End users cannot add comments to RITM in Service Portal

[daniellethomson]

End users cannot add additional comments to RITM in the Service Portal like they can to an Incident ticket. Anyone know how to fix this? I confirmed this is working from end users via the Self Service view through the Service Catalog. I also confirmed that there is a ACL for additional comments on the requested_item table. This didn't resolve the issue.

Thanks for the help!

[Marques2]

daniellethomson Any updates on this? We are experiencing the same issue and are attempting to address it very soon. I can keep you updated with any findings my team and I have.

Thanks,

-Marques

[Marques2]

daniellethomson Hi Daniel. After some research I think I'm onto something. As an ITIL user, when I go to the Service Portal I have the ability to add comments to a RITM. This made me think that there's an ACL in place that is restricting non-licensed users to have this ability. In the Native UI under System Security > Access Control (ACL), you will find a ACL with the name sc_req_item.*. This appears to show that only roles "ITIL" and "catalog" have the ability to write to the RITM fields. That being said, I'm not sure if the adding comments is writing to the RITM record.

In contrast, I found two ACLs with "write" operations for incident.comment:

One ACL shows role "ITIL" is needed, but the other shows a javascript condition that says caller or the person who opened the incident has the ability to comment:

I wonder why RITM comments were not taken into consideration here. It's quite frustrating. I was thinking of submitting a HI ticket to see if this can be an enhancement in a future release. However, first I wonder if nathanfirth or ctomasi could answer what we can do here.

Thanks!

-Marques

[nathanfirth]

marques, Not sure I understand the problem...

The Service Portal is not going to bypass the ACL's and as such if there are ACL's prohibiting end users from commenting on the RITM then Service Portal will honor those rules. I know some of those ACL's are also out-of-box but it also would not make sense for the Service Portal plugin to modify those ACL's. I don't think there is anything for ServiceNow to fix here.

The simple solution is... if you would like to enable commenting for end users on RITM, simply update the ACL's to grant write access.

[Marques2]

Thanks for the quick follow up Nathan. I understand that it is the ACL that is only allowing ITIL users to write to the RITM. I guess my overall question is, why? From a Service Portal UX perspective, I was unsure if it was specifically designed to not allow users to do this, which is why I thought I would ask. I see the point in allowing users to comment on Incidents, but wasn't sure why that wasn't a capability for RITMs.

I did not know updating ACLs was as easy as that. I figured it had to be breaking some sort of licensing agreement if we allow functionality that exists for ITIL users OOB. I will investigate the simple solution.

Thank you for your time,

-Marques