View form

From ARSWiki

Remedy View Forms are a very powerful method of making external data available to Remedy - as long as you are mindful of the restrictions of acessing database data.

Remedy View Forms allow you to 'wrap up' a database table or view so you can treat it just like a Remedy Form. This applies to any table or view which the aradmin user can see from the local ARSystem database. You can expose data in remote databases using db link or similar.

A View Form allows you to present external table/view data to users and control input in the same way as a standard Form. There are a few restrictions;

1. It is possible for the data in the table/view to be changed outside of Remedy's control. A database update to the table will not be controlled by any filters you add to the View Form. Only updates to the data via the Remedy API e.g. Remedy USer Tool will be controlled by workflow. If you need to monitor the data being entered into a View Form then you could use an escalation. There is obviously a performance overhead with this approach.
2. There are certain types of data which a View Form cannot show e.g. Database DateTime fields. You can work around this restriction by writing a View to convert the data you want to look at into Remedy compatible values.
3. When you create a View Form, Remedy automatically builds a field list based on the data types. You can subsequently modify the type of data which Remedy interprets the data as. For example an integer column is always initially created as an integer field. However you can subsequently delete the integer field and recreate it as an enum, date, time or date time field. This is useful, if you have written your own view to convert datetime values into a unix timestamp, you can replace the default integer field with a datetime field and it all looks good :)
4. In standard Remedy forms there are fields that have special meanings. For example a character field with a field ID of 4 is interpreted as the "Assignee" field. Likewise a field with an ID of 112 is the Assignee Group field. It is possible to map view form fields to these IDs and obtain the benefit of the special meanings. This feature allows row level access to be provided for view forms as well as standard Remedy forms.