Attaching Knowledge Record to Incident

[mdidrikson]

Hello,

We have noticed that in the Calgary release if we try and attach a Knowledge article to an Incident before submitting it, we receive the error:

Invalid action: Record needs to be saved first

Is there a way around this error? I believe this worked in earlier versions of ServiceNow.

Thanks!

Mark Didrikson

[leonverster]

Herewith feedback received re. the same 'issue' after a recently upgrading a customer to Calgary:

"Our development team has confirmed that the issue is actually the behaviour of the product as per the new design. This has just been implemented in Calgary. The reason being that in the past, users were able to attach a KB article to an unsaved record. The unsaved record would not have a proper sys_id before being saved and therefore when the record is abandoned (not saved)/or saved afterwards a m2m malformed record would exist. This is documented on PRB584996.

This is a general platform issue when adding related records to an unsaved records therefore it's better to not allow that.

As a result of this change, we would not allow users to attach a KB article to an incident which has not yet been saved. I have created an enhancement request for the attach KB button not being visible before the incident is saved, this is enhancement request number: FTASK16717."

Hope this is helpful!

[mdidrikson]

Yes, we have heard the same information.

Thank you for your response.

Mark Didrikson

[dwerner]

Hi there. We recently upgraded to Calgary in our Sandbox environment and noticed the same thing. I'm aware that this is operating as designed by Service Now however this really messes up our process due to a large number of mandatory fields on our incident form.
I have an enhancement task open with Service Now requesting this new functionality be made configurable but I'm certain that's not going to happen for quite some time, if at all, and we're looking to push Calgary to Prod on the weekend of Sept 28th.
I'm wondering if anyone who also sees this as a problem has come up with a viable alternative?

Thanks,
Dustin

[CapaJC]

That doesn't sound like a good change. Removing functionality to "work around" a platform issue seems iffy. So, if you don't mind "owning" one of the OOB UI Scripts used by the Knowledge Base, you can restore prior behavior.

Find the "KnowledgeFunctions" UI Script, and look for this line in the attachIncident2 function:

if (!lastSaved){

Replace that line with the following:

if (false) {

Then the new code will be bypassed, and you'll be allowed to attach a KB article to an unsaved Incident once again, with the knowledge that if the Incident ultimately doesn't get saved, you'll have a "broken" many-to-many record for the relationship between task and kb_knowledge.

This issue could probably be solved, if you care to, with a nightly scheduled script that runs against the m2m_kb_task table, validates that the related task exists for each record created in the past 24 hours, and deletes those where the task doesn't exist.