Some customers want to manage Mobile Devices. Unfortunately, no such classes exists out of the box in Service Manager. Therefore you have to create your own classes as well as build the relationships between those. In this article i will show how easy it is to use the default relationship that exists between Configuration Items. Sure, you could create your own relationships and I will show you how to this in a later post, but now I will just show how easy it is to use the default relationship.

First we need to create the needed classes. In this scenario I have created two new classes called “Mobile Device” and “SIM Card” that use “Configuration Item” as base class. I will not go through the whole process, but you can find details about creating classes and attributes in this blogpost. After creation, i added the needed attributes:

After importing the Management Pack I have created two views for the new classes and created some objects.

Now it’s time to link the SIM Cards to the mobile devices. If you edit an existing SIM Card and switch to the related items tab, you can easily add other related configuration items, in this case a mobile device. Just hit the “Add”-Button, select the correct Class and add the mobile device that the SIM Card belongs to.

Now when you open a mobile device object, the SIM Card you added before should be visible. Therefore you can see the related objects “from both sides” which is very important.

If you use this Default relationship, you dont have to care about creating relationship attributes and custom forms. The CI-to-CI relationship allows it to link all classes that derive from the “Configuration Item” class together. This relationship can be viewed in the Authoring Tool.

It’s also possible to create an explicit relationship between the ”Mobile Device” and the “SIM Card” class to configure very specific relations. The downside of this approach is, that you have to create your own forms to manage the relationship. I will show this in a later post. For now, have fun with this solution 🙂

Marcel