The Save and Exit buttons of the CI Relationship Editor are Greyed Out - Why and how to Fix it - Support and Troubleshooting

The Save and Exit buttons of the CI Relationship Editor are Greyed Out - Why and how to Fix it Description  Description When trying to add or delete relationships between CMDB CIs using the Relationship Editor, you may find the 'Save' and 'Save and Exit' buttons are greyed-out. This KB article will explain how to fix it, and the most likely causes.

And the cause of this is almost always due to something wrong with the Type value of the existing relationships, and the clue is that no Type value is shown:

Procedure You can find the bad Relationship record:

Open a list of the Relationships table - [cmdb_rel_ci] /cmdb_rel_ci_list.do

Enter the following filter, which will give records with no type value, or a Type value that does not match up with a Relationship Type record:

Type Is Empty Or Type Is Not Empty AND Type.Name Is Empty

That will give this URL: https:// .service-now.com/cmdb_rel_ci_list.do?sysparm_query=typeISEMPTY%5ENQtypeISNOTEMPTY%5Etype.nameISEMPTY

All of those records will be bad in some way, and will cause the greyed-out button symptom.

Open the [cmdb_rel_ci] record in a form and you will be able to correct the value to repair the record, or you could simply Delete the bad relationship record.

This can also be caused by the Relationship Type record being correct and referencing a Relationship Type record that is there, but either the Parent or Child Descriptor field is missing:

Applicable Versions Since Geneva, when the NG Relations formatter and Relationship Editor were added to the platform.

Additional Information These are some of the causes:

Until the London release, a new relationship record saved without a Type value would default to the value "1". This was the legacy sys_id for 'Depends on::Used by' relationship type, but the field in the dictionary retained this default value long after. This was fixed by PRB1251706 for new instances only. For customers upgrading, the default value needs clearing from the dictionary for this field manually. KB0743762: The CI Relationship record's Relationship Type reference field has a bad default value of 1 Until London (+KP8), PRB1273072 meant the Relationship Editor did not prevent the "Save and Close" button being clicked multiple times. This led to the strange effect of the sys_id value of the relationship type field being truncated. To prevent it make sure you click once and then wait for the form to close. Until London (+KP5/JP9) we had a PRB1241891 where relationships to Application CIs were created by Application Patterns before ADM had created the Application CIs. That would leave a paretne or child value empty. If Relationship Type records are manually deleted, then Cascade Delete will also delete the Relationship records, so that should not cause the issue. However if CIs and their relationships are Inserted/Imported via custom scripts or XML Import/Import Sets, and the Relationship Type does not exist, then these bad relationship records can be created that way. If Data Archiving is used for the CMDB, then a CI could be archived and the Relationship records still remain. The archive rule needs to be set up with related records in the cmdb_rel_ci table also being archived at the time, but this is impossible to do both the Parent and Child reference fields at the same time due to PRB1296280, which will aim to remove the single 'reference element' restriction. KB0695364: It is not possible to archive all cmdb_rel_ci record when CI records are Archived, leading to CompactRelation errors when the CMDB Identification Engine fails to consider that a CI may be Archived and throws an error, causing major syslog table growth Between loading the Relationship Editor, and clicking the "Save and Close" button, it is possible that the CI has been deleted by someone else for either the main CI or the related CI. A relationship record is added anyway, using the earlier sys_id values, without checking that the CIs still exist. Also, if the relationship editor form is loaded with an invalid or empty sys_id in the URL, then it would still let you add relationships to a non-existent CI, and cause bad records. Unlikely, but possible.