I have done this many times in the past months: extending the default Incident class with additional properties. With that you are able to save additional data with an Incident, so that you have all information in place when needed. When the Incident class is extended, you must give the service desk people a chance to set and read values for those properties. This is normally done by adding new controls to the Incident form and then bind them to the specific properties. Beside that, all extensions are also visible on the extension tab. As soon as the Incident class is extended with a property, this tab is automatically added to the Incident form. That also means that the new properties will be visible on the regular form (lets say on the general tab) and also on the extensions tab. Because this could be misleading, it’s possible to hide this tab.

This is how the default Incident form looks like when no extension and configuration happened so far.

To demonstrate the behavior, I will add an additional property to the Incident class and place a textbox on the Incident form. I do this using the Authoring Tool. First, I create a new Management Pack and extend the Incident class. To store the customizations, I select my newly created, unsealed MP.

Now I add a new property called “Cost Center”. For more details about extending classes see this blog post.

Now as the Incident class is extended, I will add a textbox to the default Incident form. Again, this was already discussed in this blog post and I will not go again into any details. For this example, I will make room by collapsing the “Alternate contact method” section. After saving and importing the MP, the Incident form shows the new attribute. Also check out the extensions tab at the very top of the form.

If you want to remove this tab, two customizations in XML are needed. Just edit your MP in your favorite XML editor and first add two references to the MP (if not already there).

Next, I need to add a category entry that uses the Incident form as a target.

Because we changed the default Incident form, we also have to change the target of the category. Take a look at the ID of the relevant form in the same MP and change the target to the ID of the form. If there were no modifications on the Incident form, this step can be skipped.

That’s it. Save the MP and import it. Now you will still see the additional property bound to the textbox on the Incident form, but the extension tab is gone.

This procedure could also be helpful if you don’t wanna make additional properties visible for editing at all. If not explicitly placed on the Incident form, the property would be invisible, but it’s there and can be used to store data (maybe by using scripts).

regards
Marcel