Hi fellow K2Community members,

I recently spoke to the esteemed Tim Knetchel with regards to some oddities with the "Participant Name" field part that was empty when used in an email message body. Strange thing was, using the ADServiceV2 SmartObject, we were able to pull the name from AD, place it in a data field and use that field in the process. Everything else was working just fine in this environment, except for this.

After playing around for a while, we decided to take a step back to see if we can find the "common denominator" for all the problem environments and Tim pointed out that he is only seeing this in multi-domain environments. We had a look at the identity services cache and noticed that there were a couple of properties missing from the environments where we are having the issue and one of them just happened to be the "DisplayName" property.

We tracked it down to a K2 blackpearl documentation "woopsie"!

See the "Implementation Script" section of the following article.

http://help.k2.com/helppages/k2blackpearlgettingstarted4.6.7/webframe.html#after_addingmultipledomains.html

For the sake of readability I'm just going to show the properties section, but you should get the gist of it :)

<properties>
             <user>
                            <property name="Name" type="System.String" />
                            <property name="Description" type="System.String" />
                            <property name="Email" type="System.String" />
                            <property name="Manager" type="System.String" />
                            <property name="SipAccount" type="System.String" />
                            <property name="ObjectSID" type="System.String" />
                            <property>name="DisplayName" type="System.String" /> <!-- Missing from implementation script -->
                            <property>name="CommonName" type="System.String" /> <!-- Missing from implementation script -->
                            <property>name="UserPrincipalName" type="System.String" /> <!-- Missing from implementation script -->
             </user>
             <group>
                            <property name="Name" type="System.String" />
                            <property name="Description" type="System.String" />
                            <property>name="Email" type="System.String" /> <!-- Missing from implementation script -->
             </group>
</properties>

When you update the K2 label without those properties in the mix, the user properties in the "Identity.Identity" table looks like this.

(Notice the 3 missing properties)

<properties xmlns="http://schemas.k2.com/identity/customProperties.xsd">
             <item name="Name" value="DENALLIXAdministrator" />
             <item name="Description" value="Built-in account for administering the computer/domain" />
             <item name="Email" value="administrator@denallix.com" />
             <item name="Manager" value="DENALLIXJonno" />
             <item name="SipAccount" value="" />
             <item name="ObjectSID" value="S-1-5-21-2909763360-4142824838-1966383015-500" />
</properties>

It should look more like this...

<properties xmlns="http://schemas.k2.com/identity/customProperties.xsd">
             <item name="Name" value="DENALLIXAdministrator" />
             <item name="Description" value="Built-in account for administering the computer/domain" />
             <item name="Email" value="administrator@denallix.com" />
             <item name="Manager" value="DENALLIXJonno" />
             <item name="SipAccount" value="" />
             <item name="ObjectSID" value="S-1-5-21-2909763360-4142824838-1966383015-500" />
             <item name="DisplayName" value="Denallix Administrator" />
             <item name="CommonName" value="Administrator" />
             <item name="UserPrincipalName" value="administrator@denallix.com" />
</properties>

This is what caused the "Participant Name" field part to return an empty value each time. We added the user 3 properties, and the 1 group property back to the K2 label in the "HostServer.SecurityLabel" table. Next, we expired the identities in the "Identity.Identity" table and all was well with the world.

I have reached out to the K2 documentation team and they assured me that they will fix the article soon. Until such a time, hopefully this little post will save someone some time :) 

And last, but certainly not least, I want to give a big shout out to Tim Knetchel for being such a stand-up guy! He was always quick to respond, always available to help, super knowledgeable and just a great chap! It has been an honor man! :) I’m looking forward to working with you in the future.

Greetings and salutations,

Willem le Roux.