Making Workflow Field Mandatory in Knowledge Management

[kkeerthan]

Hi Experts,

In the Zurich ServiceNow instance, I need the Workflow field in the Knowledge Management form to be mandatory.

Initially, the field was not mandatory, so I updated it at the dictionary level to make it mandatory.

After this change, the field is mandatory only in the Draft state.

However, my requirement is to have the Workflow field mandatory in other states as well, specifically Review and Pending Retirement.

Currently, the mandatory indicator is not appearing in these states.

I need a solution or approach to enforce the mandatory condition for the Workflow field across all required states.

Thanks in advance.

[Bhavesh B]

Hi @kkeerthan :  

In ServiceNow you can achieve anything, but you have to weigh in the value it would bring to customize the OOTB behavior. Is it worth that much effort to investigate and maintain the technical debt that it may bring it?

Anyways coming back to your query.

Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to identify this. You will need to review what is causing the Workflow State field to be non‑mandatory across various configurations such as UI Policies, Business Rules, Script Includes, Workflows, Client Scripts (CS), and other related logic.

That said, instead of going through all this effort, it’s worth asking a fundamental question: why should a read‑only field to be made mandatory at first place? From a functional perspective, this does not add much value and it would be better to revisit and adjust the intended behavior.

Coming to the issue that arose after you changed the behavior of the Workflow State field by overriding the dictionary entry to make it mandatory:

• For the Draft state, the field appears as mandatory because of the dictionary override you applied.
• It is reasonable to assume that there are no UI Policies, Business Rules, Script Includes, Workflows, or Client Scripts overriding this behavior for the Draft state.

If the issue is that the workflow field inconsistently shows as mandatory only for Draft and not for other states, the recommended approach would be to revert the dictionary override and restore the field to its original configuration. This will ensure the field is not mandatory in Draft as well, thereby maintaining consistent behavior across all states.

Still the big question remains and we move back to your original requirement: "In the Zurich ServiceNow instance, I need the Workflow field in the Knowledge Management form to be mandatory."  --- Why this requirement? What you plan to achieve, by this solution?

Best regards,

Bhavesh

[Aditya_hublikar]

Hello @kkeerthan ,

I research about workflow field but there is no any ui policy, data policy or client script which making workflow field by default readonly 🙂 . Still not getting due which logic/configuration it is readonly . 

If you have to update  workflow state forcefully I have one  custom approach 

create one custom field replica of workflow state field and which should visible for review and pending retirement state and make it mandatory at that moment , then use business rule to change to update value from custom field to workflow field .

like current.workflow_state=current.u_workflow_state;

I think this might work 🙂 .

If this helps you then mark it as helpful and accept as solution.

Regards,

Aditya