Finding structure

Every finding is built out of a set of rich text sections, things like “Description” or “Business impact.” This page controls which sections exist, what order they appear in, and where else they show up, across every finding and catalogue template on your instance.

You’ll find this screen under Settings → Finding structure. It needs its own permission to manage, separate from managing findings themselves, and changes here never delete data already saved in a section, only hide it.

What a content section is

Each section is one narrative field on a finding or catalogue entry, with a handful of properties you control:

• Label, the name shown on the form.
• Slug, a stable internal identifier used when this section’s content is pulled into a report template. It’s generated automatically from the label when you create the section and never changes afterward, even if you rename the label later.
• Order, its position relative to the other sections, lower first.
• Active, whether it currently appears on forms and in exports at all.
• Supports image upload, whether its editor allows embedding images.
• Portal visible, whether client portal users see it on a QA approved finding.
• Include in remediation report only, restricts it to remediation report exports, hidden from the initial report.
• Scan import, whether Scanner import writes each result’s details into this section. Only one section can have it, and it can’t be Affected Assets, which scanner import already fills from each result’s host or URL. With none ticked, imported findings arrive without their details, and the import page says so.

Affected Assets is a built-in, protected section

Every deployment has one extra section beyond whatever you’ve configured yourself: Affected Assets. You can reorder and rename it exactly like any other section, but it isn’t ordinary content. It’s tied directly to a finding’s own list of affected hosts and URLs, the same list Scanner import fills in automatically, rather than being a rich text field you type into here.

Because of that, it can’t be deleted. There’s no delete option for it on this screen. Turning its Active toggle off does hide it everywhere, the same as deactivating any other section, without losing the underlying data on any finding.

A fresh instance starts with none

Unlike the built-in Affected Assets section above, a brand new instance ships with zero narrative content sections. Nothing is pre-seeded, by design: what a finding’s write-up actually looks like is entirely up to you, built from scratch on this screen rather than assumed for you.

Starting from a working example instead of a blank slate

If you’d rather begin from a complete, populated set of sections instead of building one up from nothing, RedScribe ships an optional command that seeds a full sample pentest report format: eight content sections (including a “Risk Assessment” section that explains the reasoning behind a finding’s rating, not just its content), a demo finding template, and a fully built report profile to go with them. It’s not run automatically; someone with server access runs it deliberately with python manage.py seed_pentest_report_format, and it’s safe to re-run, since it never overwrites content that already exists.

Whatever set you end up with, sections are managed here, not from inside the finding or catalogue editor itself. Adding, reordering, or deactivating a section changes what appears on every finding and catalogue template, and what gets pulled into a Document report template, immediately and across the whole instance. If you’re writing a custom Document template and need to reference a specific section by its stable slug, the Report template tags page covers that syntax.

Managing sections

1. Add a section. Select Add section at the top of the page, give it a label, and set the flags above. Its slug and order are assigned automatically, and a new section always goes to the end.
2. Reorder by moving a section up or down relative to its neighbors.
3. Turn Active off to hide a section instance wide without losing anything already saved in it on existing findings. It just stops appearing on forms and in exports.
4. Delete a section to remove it entirely.

Deleting a section is destructive

Unlike deactivating, deleting a content section removes any content already stored in it, along with any comment threads attached to it, on every finding and catalogue entry. If you just want to stop using a section without losing historical data, turn Active off instead of deleting it.

Hidden sections are hidden everywhere

A section with Active off is left out of every exported format, Markdown, PDF, HTML, and Word alike, not just the app’s own screens. There’s no case where it quietly still shows up in one export but not another. See Reports and exports.