Publishing articles through an API

[Mike Hashemi]

I am looking for a way to either create articles in a "published" state, or trigger the "publish" workflow through the REST API.

I wrote a little PowerShell snippet that is creating the articles in "draft":

$serviceNowCredential = Get-Credential
$uri = "https://<instance>.service-now.com/api/now/table/kb_knowledge"
$method = "POST"

# Build auth header
$base64AuthInfo = [Convert]::ToBase64String([Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes(("{0}:{1}" -f $ServiceNowCredential.UserName, $serviceNowCredential.GetNetworkCredential().Password)))

# Set proper headers
$headers = New-Object "System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary[[String],[String]]"
$headers.Add('Authorization', ('Basic {0}' -f $base64AuthInfo))
$headers.Add('Accept', 'application/json')
$headers.Add('content-type', 'application/json')

$tempObj = [PsCustomObject]@{
    text              = 'Some stuff goes here' 
    sys_created_by    = 'user@emaildomain.com'
    author            = 'e9326af747d9611091271c42846d43bd'
    active            = 'true'
    kb_knowledge_base = 'cf33206447e5a11091271c42846d43ac'
    topic             = 'General'
    short_description = 'How to do a Thing'
    article_type      = 'text'
    kb_category       = 'a196b8a44729a11091271c42846d438c'
}

$response = Invoke-WebRequest -Headers $headers -Method $method -Uri $uri -Body ($tempObj | ConvertTo-Json) -ErrorAction Stop

 That works just fine, but I don't see any way to publish the resulting article. I found How to create knowledge article in ServiceNow with article state as Publish?, but the answer just says, "go look at the REST API Explorer".

I did that, which made me think to try a PUT with "scheduled_publish_date", then "published" with today's date (2023-03-14), but neither helped. Is there another field, at which I should be looking? What am I missing?

[Mike Hashemi · Accepted solution]

In the end, I'm sticking with the script to create the article, but then created a business rule to automatically kick of the approval workflow any time the API service account does an insert.