History of Integrity-Items is dynamic?

[JensN.]

Hi @all,

in the last days some Integrity-Items in our ChangeManagement were reworked, and in this context some field names are also changed. As an example: Until last week we had two test-tasks and a review-task in our workflow. These two tasks were now splitted into three tasks, the review-task is gone and all names were changed. So we had until last weeks two boolean flieds in our item: Task_A and Task_B. Now we have three boolean Fields: Test_1, Test_2 and Test_3, and Test_1 is new, Test_2 is the old Task_A and Test_3 is the old Task_B. The field for the review was a shorttext-field and it is gone.

When we now look into the history of such an Item, there is no Task_A or Task_B, only the new names are visible. And more worse: even in the history there is no more review-field. So this kind of history seems not really usable, if we had to look at some items in ten years or later, no one will know about the renaming? Is there any history which holds the old values and fieldnames?

kind regards, Jens

[mrump · Accepted solution]

Hi Jens,

by design , the fields that form an Item are referenced by internal IDs. The Display Name of a field you see in the history is only reflecting the current Field setup.

This is because PTC Items are only rows in a huge DB table and any change in the table setup automatically reflects to all rows.

If you need a long term "archive", maybe you should think about a scheduled trigger that generates a for example pdf report of a certain item and store these report as attachments in the item itself or in a separate archive.

HTH

[JensN.]

Hi Matthias,

i know about these internal IDs, but i wasnt aware that the history seems to be generated every time. The biggest problem i see is that fields which are removed from the item are also removed from the history at all timestamps. This means, that all fields, which are ever used in an item, should never removed but maybe moved into an invisible tab at the item only to have it seen in the history? Sorry @PTC, but thats crap.

kind regards, Jens

[KaelLizak]

Hello Jens,

I believe the reason for this is because if we didn't rename the field in the history, there would be a reference to a field in the history, but no obvious indication in the fields as to what happened to that field.

If you would like a feature to implement this, please open a case with Integrity Support, and we can file a change request for you.

Regards,
Kael

[JensN.]

Hi Kael,

this is already filed to the integrity.-Support, and i think next it will be signed as "works as designed" from the support and then we will open a new RfC

kind regards, Jens