Why Can’t I Delete That Entry in ServiceDesk Plus?

8 July 2014
by Nigel Arnold

I’m often having to clear out ‘legacy’ settings in client installations of ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. The biggest concerns usually revolve around the deletion of Sites, Departments, Categories and Support Groups.

First off with Sites, Departments and Categories you often end up with a greyed out entry which is marked as ‘Not for Further Usage’ when you attempt to delete one of these entries:

Whilst the option will no longer be available as an ‘active’ selection in ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus it does tend to cause a certain amount of frustration as it makes the configuration pages difficult to read. Whilst the ‘greyed out’ entries could always be reactivated and relabelled this may not always be practical.

Deletion of Sites does cause considerable confusion as it is simply not possible in pre 9.x versions if the Site is anywhere in use in ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. Not only that it won’t even grey out the Site setting either! At least in the current 9.x version of ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus Zoho has added a migration utility to transfer the Site setting to a required default when you delete an active Site entry:

So how do you delete those greyed-out entries in your configuration? I’m afraid it is down to some skilful detective work but the main areas you’ll need to look at are as follows to make sure the entries to be deleted are not set in any way:

Requests – any requests with a value set?
Requesters – any Sites and Departments set?
Technicians – any Sites and Departments set?
Change – any Categories set?
Problem – any Categories set?
Assets – is the Site set against any assets?
Reports – any entries used in a report filter for example?

Don’t forget to use the power of the reporting module to help track down those elusive entries!

Oh, and one last thing don’t fall foul of the new trash feature in version 9.x (available off the Filter drop-down in the Requests module) as you won’t be able to delete an entry until you’ve cleared the trash of any Requests that might still reference it:

Hope that helps a little.

Enjoy!

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