Service Portal Search Stops Work for Non-Admins in Zurich

[jmiskey]

We are in the progress of upgrading from Xanadu to Zurich.  We promoted our DEV and TST instances to Zurich, and one thing we have noticed is that the Search functionality on the Service Portal no longer seems to work.  It was reported to us by a user, and when we try it as an admin, it seems to work.  But if we impersonate a non-admin user, it does not seem to work.  We just get a message like this:

I am guessing that maybe they updated some ACLs or something, though I am not sure which ones.  I am not sure if the change was actually done in Yokohoma or Zurich (since we skipped Yokohoma).

Does anyone have any information on this, or what we need to do to re-enable the Search functionality to work for non-admins again, like it always used to in the past?

[kaushal_snow]

HI @jmiskey ,

Ensure that the tables involved in search operations (such as sc_cat_item, kb_knowledge etc.) have appropriate Query ACLs configured. Non admin users need explicit permissions to query these tables. If these ACLs are missing or misconfigured, non admin users may be denied access to search results.....and later Verify that text indexing is enabled and up to date for the relevant tables. Without proper indexing, search functionality may not return results for non-= admin users, even if the data exists....

If you found my response helpful, please mark it as ‘Accept as Solution’ and ‘Helpful’. This helps other community members find the right answer more easily and supports the community.

[jmiskey]

A little more clarification as to what is going on.

As an admin, if I type something in the search box, and hit enter right away, I see this:

Alternatively, if I type something in the Search box and wait a few seconds, I see a list to select from right in the Search box, i.e.

I can select what item I want to go to from either of the two screens I show above.

However, for non-admins, if they type something in the Search box and hit enter right-away, they see this:

If they enter something in the Search box and wait a few seconds, it works for them (like this):

This is new behavior!  It never acted this way before!  Non-admins used to be able to search both ways, just like Admins in my example above.  We are already getting questions about it from our Testers who are used to typing something in that box and hitting enter right away.  Something changed in Yokohoma or Zurich to change this behavior.  I am trying to figure out exactly what that is!

Note that I am not working with anything new here, as far as what I am looking for.  I am looking for old, existing Catalog Items from the Search box that have been around for years.  If I try it in our Prod environment, which is still on Xanadu, it works as expected.

[jmiskey · Accepted solution]

Upon further review, it appears that the issue may be more related to the Custom Service Portal wire frames we had made for us by a 3rd party vendor.  We tried it on the out-of-the-box Service Portal in our PDI, and it did not exhibit that behavior.  So I don't think it is an issue with the ServiceNow release.  The release may have changed things (maybe some new ACLs or something like that), but it appears that it did not break the OOTB Service Portal, but instead broke our customized version of it.

Thanks for looking anyway!

[Nadia F]

Joe, we ran into the same issue post upgrade to Zurich. Search preview displays results, but when hit Enter receive No results found. Affects non-admin users. Were you able to figure out how to resolve this issue?