All of the most challenging upgrades I have done have been for customized ITSM installations. Overlay customizations can now be created to avoid many of the challenges that used to exist during these upgrades. Overlays were created to prevent customization from being discarded when you do upgrades. Most of all overlays enforce best practices to avoid the pitfalls which can cause upgrades to fail.
Yet, many of the ITSM administrators I have worked with keep having the same issue. “I am trying to modify a field, but all the options are disabled. I changed to base development mode and I was able to make my change.”
By customizing the field in base development mode and not as an overlay negates all the benefits that overlays provide. I have found that the problem is always a missing view overlay. When a field overlay is created a view overlay and a form overlay are also created automatically. And in most cases nothing else is required to complete the customization.
However, if a different view is selected, then no additional view overlay is created. Also if more than a single view is being customized then all the other views must also have overlays. These additional overlays must be created manually from the form menu.
Understanding this is simple if there are other changes required on a different view, or if the change has to be localized to another language. What is not clear is that there are many other field options which also require changes to a fields view properties.
A perfect example is adding a new selection attribute to a selection field. Because the selection attribute also defines the alias value on a per view basis, the function to add a new attribute will be disabled until all views have an overlay.
By simply checking that each view on a form has an overlay can avoid most issues working with form overlays or resolve them in a couple of clicks. This will save hours of frustration and a call to support to find why that option is disabled. I am all for avoiding that critical support ticket to find out why installing the latest ITSM version has wiped out your customization on production server.
