Manual and Review activities applied via a template to an existing work item are created without prefix

Folks, in our Phoenix blog post we promised greater community engagement from the PG on this forum... so here's a quick post documenting a workaround for a known issue in Service Manager.

There is an issue in Service Manager 2012+ when applying templates with embedded Manual or Review activities on existing Incidents and Service Requests. The update works as expected, however the activities created do not have the “MA” or “RA” prefix – so instead of the ID being MA254, it’s just 254.

In the Activities view you will see this:

Notice that the “MA” and “RA” prefixes are missing

instead of:

This becomes especially problematic when using the Exchange Connector because you will not be able to update the affected work items as it expects the prefix to be there. The same may also hold true for integration with Orchestrator.

For more information on how to configure workflows in Service Manager click here.

There is a workaround to get the prefixes back again. To get this working as expected, you can manually update each template and explicitly add the “MA” or “RA” prefix as follows:

1. Export the MPs which contain the templates
2. Open the XML in your favorite XML editor and do a “find” for the activity title, in this case I had named one of my activities “Prefix Test Manual Activity”. The XML line which you’re looking for should look something like this <Property Path="$Context/Property[Type='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItem']/Title$">Prefix Test Manual Activity</Property>
3. The XML block should look like this:
4. One you’ve found this update your template by adding the following line as the first property for each Manual Activity <Property Path="$Context/Property[Type='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Activity_Library!System.WorkItem.Activity']/Id$">MA{0}</Property>
5. and for each Review Activity add the following line <Property Path="$Context/Property[Type='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Activity_Library!System.WorkItem.Activity']/Id$">RA{0}</Property>
6. Increase the MP version and import it back into Service Manager
7. Restart the OMCFG service and make sure that the MP is downloaded and applied (events 1201 and 1210)

That’s it, you should now be able to apply Incident and Service Request templates with the included activities having the expected prefix.

Kudos to José, one of our escalation engineers, for sharing this fix. BTW, the team's tracking this bug in our backlog and will work towards fixing it in the coming URs.