Managing A Change Freeze Window In ServiceDesk Plus Enterprise

Had this requirement the other day regarding Change Freeze dates. The customer wanted to warn technicians raising changes that their scheduled change dates fell into their upcoming annual change freeze window.

As a quick fix, we added the following script to their default Change Template as a Field & Form On Form Load rule to prompt the Technicians with a warning if this was the case:

Script Code

var start_freeze_window = new Date("20 Dec 2017, 15:23:00");
var end_freeze_window = new Date("02 Jan 2018, 15:23:00");


if(
  ($CS.getValue("SCHEDULEDSTARTTIME").getTime() <= end_freeze_window.getTime() && 
   $CS.getValue("SCHEDULEDSTARTTIME").getTime() >= start_freeze_window.getTime())
)   
{
    alert("Start date falls during change freeze.");
    /*stop form submission*/
    $CS.stopFormSubmission();


}
else if(
  ($CS.getValue("SCHEDULEDENDTIME").getTime() <= end_freeze_window.getTime() && 
   $CS.getValue("SCHEDULEDENDTIME").getTime() >= start_freeze_window.getTime())
)   
{
    alert("End date falls during change freeze.");
    /*stop form submission*/
    $CS.stopFormSubmission();


}
else if ($CS.getValue("SCHEDULEDSTARTTIME").getTime() <= start_freeze_window.getTime() && 
   $CS.getValue("SCHEDULEDENDTIME").getTime() >= end_freeze_window.getTime())
{
    alert("Change freeze period during scheduled dates.");
    /*stop form submission*/
    $CS.stopFormSubmission();  
} 

Obviously this only deals with a single upcoming date range based on values defined in the script variables.

If I was to take this further I’d probably look at the possibility of using the Change Custom Triggers to action an external script to look up the current Change Freeze dates from a Change Freeze record in ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus (via the API) or perhaps performing an external lookup of dates.

One for another time … ;0)

Enjoy!