Portal: My favorites "You don't have access to X of your favorited items." message issue

[bbf35621]

I have received a strange message on the My favorites widget on the ESC homepage, "You don't have access to X of your favorited items.".

I have an admin role, and I do have access to all catalog items and articles. It didn't show that a while back before the user criteria was applied to some catalog items and now it's showing up. I have added myself to a group where it is in the user criteria and still has that message. Another strange thing I found out is if I add more favorited items, the number of X in the message will be reduced, which makes no sense. This also happened to other users. Is it possible that it's a bug from the ServiceNow side and there is an EC plugin that might fix that issue? My EC plugin version is 28.0.4, but I don't know if upgrading the plugin will fix that. Can someone point me out where that might cause?

[bbf35621 · Accepted solution]

I found out why that happened! The message was a bit misleading. That message showed up in My Favorite because the catalog items we saved as favorites were deactivated. We saved them before they were deactivated. So I went to sp_favorite_list.do and remove the record that saved the deactivated catalog items and now it fixes the issue. It's still a bug on the ServiceNow side because it should have automatically been removed from favorite records if deactivated it.

[Mark Roethof]

O that's an interesting find, didn't expect that! Thanks for letting us know.

If it's a bug, at least it doesn't sound as a correct situation. Did you open a Support Case to let ServiceNow know? 

[Whitney Fraser]

Thank you for the list name!!  Very helpful!

The same error message appears if the user favorited an item, then visibility was updated on that item (via user criteria) and the user no longer has visibility/access to it.  Same steps would need to be applied: Go to sp_favorite_list.do and remove the record from that user.

[leochavez]

I encountered the same thing while upgrading to Xanadu and opened a ticket with SNOW support.  It appears this is expected behavior as reported in PRB1702193: https://support.servicenow.com/nav_to.do?uri=problem.do?sys_id=7e7476b19321b554101833527cba10e7

They noted, "...this defect PRB1702193 has been closed by our development team as this is the expected behavior as per current product design and this might be addressed in the future as a product enhancement."

As to why this occurs, bff35621 was on the nose: "When the records associated with the portal favorites (sp_favorite) are made inactive, the error message "You don't have access to x of your favorited items" pops up in the "Favorites" widget in the portal. The favorite records associated with the inactive Catalog Items or Knowledge Articles are still present in the sp_favorite table and is not viewable from the portal. The favorite records are deleted only when the user explicitly unfavorites the item on the portal or manually deletes the records in the backend sp_favorite table."