KB Articles including draft and retired are searchable from Global search

[BhupeshG]

We found that irrespective of status (including retired) KB Articles are searchable from Global search.

We feel it is a bug, as per the process only Published KB Articles should be visible or searchable to even ITIL users.

We found that even ITIL user can search articles in Draft, Build, Review, Retired status from Global Search.

Updates from HI portal

1. I am able to reproduce the issue on our dev instance <> (Helsinki-patch9) and also on my OOTB instance (Helsinki-patch9). Noticed ITIL users able to do global search for KB articles are in draft/review/retired state.

1. This is definitely is not expected behavior and itil users not suppose to search article in draft state. This behavior has been correctly in Istanbul onward. I have tried to check the behavior once again and noticed that itil user is not able to see article is state is not published. Below is the global query while searching any article as global search:

(Workflow = Published AND Active = true AND Valid to > <today's date> AND Knowledge base Active = true AND Language = English AND Number != <your input>)

1. I would suggest you to upgrade to Istanbul in order to fix this issue. I don't find any workaround which can apply now on HP9 unfortunately.

is anybody aware that how to fix this issue in Helsinki-patch9??? gauravchoudhuryctomasigauravchoudhuryBobbygauravchoudhury

[williamsun]

You could try a before query ACL, but results would need to be tested in subproduction first.

Other than that, you should really try to upgrade to Istanbul, it's pretty stable, and at the rate they are moving, you can end up out of support rather quickly.

[Gilbert Jimenez]

Hey Bhupesh,

You may be running into Problem Ticket (PRB676743 - Non-published knowledge articles are being returned in global search for exact match) which has since been closed as expected behavior.

Are the users that are able to search globally for an article part of the 'Can contribute' related list for the knowledge base in which the article is found?

If so this allows users the ability to see articles in that knowledge base regardless of the articles state (in your case 'draft').

If this is the case the 'Work around' for this would be to limit the users added to the 'Can contribute' list to only users who should be able to contribute. This will limit the user from being able to search for these articles.

Please let me know if the above was of assistance to you.

+Best Regards,

Gilbert

[gauravchoudhury]

Hi Bhupesh,

Probably what Glibert Jimenez stated on the problem ticket (ref# PRB676743) is related. However, I do not have the full context to it.

But, I did find this interesting piece of information under docs.servicenow.com, which states that "All users with at least one ServiceNow role can read, create, and edit knowledge articles. However, the knowledge manager of a knowledge base can select criteria to restrict this access." I believe that this statement gives in the prospect that maybe the roles (like 'itil' for example) have not been restricted to find Articles from Global Search. Because the Global Search feature is available from 'itil' roles and above.

On that context, I would like to comment that maybe a before query ACL suggested by William Sun might be a solution worth trying.

The suggestion to upgrade to Istanbul can be given a thought only if more than one problem is fixed by a platform upgrade. Otherwise, you might end up breaking other stuff because of an instance upgrade.

So please consider to take a look at the release notes & check for any existing customization and integration in your environment before an upgrade.

[BhupeshG]

we found this persist in Jakarta as well. Did anyone find a proper solution.