Only thing I can find on that is this ServiceNow KB article. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s just something that isn’t supported and I’m not sure of a current workaround.

https://hi.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0564887

We tried doing an encoded query and the ^NQ makes everything go bonkers – which we later found out was a ServiceNow issue but they consider it normal behavior.

Example:

We want to show all Incidents where a Sensitive flag is true and the user is the caller OR where a Sensitive flag is false and the user is a member of the currently assigned group.

var encodedQuery = current.getEncodedQuery();
var indexActiveFalse = encodedQuery.indexOf('active=false');
var indexActiveTrue = encodedQuery.indexOf('active=true');
if (indexActiveFalse == -1 || indexActiveTrue == -1 ) {
	current.addActiveQuery();
}

There actually is a way to do this, though it’s a bit of a hack. On the OOB ‘user query’ business rule, change the script to the following:

if (current.getEncodedQuery().indexOf(‘allow_inactive=true’) != 0) {
current.addActiveQuery();
}

Then on any user references where you explicitly want to allow inactive users to be visible set the start of the reference qualifier to be ‘allow_inactive=true’. Because this attribute doesn’t exist the system essentially ignores this value (thought there’s a system property for strict glide record queries which may give you problems here if you have it enabled but it’s off by default) but we can still detect its existence in our Business Rule to accomplish our goal.

Now we can explicitly allow inactive users where we want them, without having to turn it off system wide.

The query business rule will override everything else so there’s not really a way to do what you’re looking to do unless you disable the business rule or allow other roles the ability to see inactive users. If you do that, then you would need to go back to your reference fields and add ‘active=true’ to every other place. That’s probably not very practical, but that’s what you would need to do unless you can adjust your process somehow.

This solution works great in our instance! However, I do need to allow inactive users to be selected on one of our catalog items. A comment above stated inactive records can be seen, but not in ours. We have a condition on ours “gs.getSession().isInteractive()”. What would I add so this rule does not run on one specific catalog item? I’ve tried several conditions and can’t seem to get the right one. Thanks for your help!

Troy

Great feedback! Hopefully we’ll see this fully implemented soon :).

I also checked our dev instance (build: Aspen 04-30-2012_2149) and the fix is still needed for referenced fields; the activity formatter as well as the sys_email table show inactive referenced records properly.

Parallel tried it in a demo instance (build Aspen 05-18-2012_1143) and there it already works for the caller field but not yet for the opened_by.

Seems like it will be fully implemented soon but so far: Thx for the fix :)