Service Portal - How to make navigation ask "Leave Site: Changes you made may not be saved."

[phillipkeigley]

In our new Service Portal, we have a standard SP Header.  When we load a Catalog item or other content which takes inputs, and you add input,  the navigation lets you leave immediately without asking if you want to leave.  Whereas the browser asks if you want to leave the site.

I looked at converting the menu items from type page to type url and then using the full url.  That does not seem ideal. 

Anyone have a suggestion on how to make the navigation ask you if you want to leave when you have added input to a ServiceNow form?

[Oleg · Accepted solution]

OK, I think I understand now your main problem. My short answer: the usage of iframe seems only good at the first glance. On the other side it's really the worst implementation for Service Portal integration because of security of iframes. One have to port the application to Service Portal using built-in or custom widgets.

Try to open https://dev77499.service-now.com/sp?sys_id=85071a1347c12200e0ef563dbb9a71c1&id=form&table=incident or https://dev77499.service-now.com/sp?sys_id=1c741bd70b2322007518478d83673af3&id=form&table=incident, which uses Service Portal page with id=form, which uses Form widget. It loads incidents, apply UI Policy and Client Scripts of incidents. Some applied scripts are common for "classical" UI and Service Portal. Other are different for both platforms (Desktop and Mobile/Service Portal). It's the recommended way.

I understand that migration of large application created for "classical" UI to Service Portal isn't easy. But I see no alternatives. We made the work for our custom application. It took time, but it was really required for creating Service Portal application, which can be used really productive. It's my personal opinion. Sorry, for the bad news.

[phillipkeigley]

I appreciate your help greatly, thank you. One of the challenges we have is we are very customized and are delivering enterprise apps with iframes in our old CMS site.  The level of effort to convert some of the customization's is very significant.  Some of the biggest migration path issues for us is that the ServiceNow OOTB widgets are not robust enough.  

I have been reluctant to make custom form widgets because then when ServiceNow upgrades/fixes the form widget, we don't get the update next upgrade and it will eventually break.

Thanks for your help!

[Oleg]

I agree that the problem of maintain of cloned widgets is't solved by ServiceNow. The only safe way: one need to examine all changes in original widget after every Patch/Version and if the changes are helpful one has to make close changes in the cloned widget. It's really uncomfortable, but one starts to understand cloned widgets very good after some time.

Additionally we developed new own widget based of the form widget. It displays results in tabs and display Process Flow formatter if it exist. The results are better as with Form widget, but maintains of the widget is a little time consuming (like you mentioned).

Good Luck!

P.S. By the way, our clone of the Form widget displays results like on the picture below:

[Palak Rao1]

I am facing an issue with this save functionality while leaving the page. It is not working for tables in specific custom application. Any possible reasons for this?