Question: How can mandatory fields in i.e. policies all of a sudden be empty?

Forum - Software
1

I just needed to edit a policy, edit not review, and when saving I was told that a mandatory field was left empty and hence I cannot save.

Now if that was a new policy, that would be understandable, but this one is many years old and has 14 reviews.

I am left wondering if it cannot be saved without filling in these fields, how come it is in my database saved with these two fields empty?

Would you guys be able to have a look?
This has happened a handful of times but rarely enough that I thought it might have been a mistake on my side but now that I think about it, I don’t even know how I could manually save a policy with an empty mandatory field.

2

Did the fields become mandatory after the last time you saved the policy?

3

As far as I know, those have always been mandatory.

4

Hello,

I can only think of these scenarios:

  • Differences between Community and Enterprise: those older documents may be from Community, where the fields could be slightly different.
  • Some fields were marked as mandatory after the document was created.
5

Hi Sam,

the first option is possible, we used to be on the community version but switched to the enterprise version like 7 or 8 years ago.

I don’t think the second option is possible seeing that this particular policy where I noticed the problem dates back to 2020, has 14 reviews and the mission fields are “GRC contact” and “Policy Reviewer Contact” - I don’t think those could ever not have been mandatory.

Anyway, currently, listing all policies and filtering by if field is empty, its only this one showing up. I will keep an eye on it, we had like 2-3 like these pop up every year. IF this never happens again, obviously the issue is gone but if it happens again from this point onward, where I actually checked that no policy has empty fields, there has to be a different cause.