Export options for FULL KB articles (including screenshots)

[Sam78]

What are my options and formats for exporting KB's en masse, and not just in list format i.e. full articles with screenshots, etc.?

[bammar]

I want to say.... If you right click, export XML it will actually take ALL data including attachments. 

[mbernste]

That has not been my experience.  It seems to be text only, however, it does export the HTML, which when imported into something like MS Access, will be formatted if the exported fields containing HTML are set to rich text in the Access database.

[Sam Goode]

If you want them in human readable format such as PDFs, it's possible but not easy.

1. To get a single article, you can go to the article in the platform UI and click on "View Article" in the related links section.
2. From here you can go to the settings (gear icon next to your profile), and select Print friendly view.
3. The article should display with all the images
4. Then from there you can use the browser print function to print to PDF.

Obviously that's not a good answer for everything in the knowledge-base. However, assuming the above format is suitable, there are a couple of elements we can stitch together to make life a little easier. 

The following URL should get you to the same place as step 3 above. So if you can export a list of all of the article numbers and optionally versions, you can use something like Excel or a text editor to compile a list of all the URLs you will need.

YourServiceNowURL/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0123456&sysparm_stack=no&sysparm_media=print

Or for a specific version of an article: 

YourServiceNowURL/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0123456&sysparm_version=1.0&sysparm_stack=no&sysparm_media=print

To actually automate this futher, you'll need to use some separate programs that will:

• Authenticate you to your instance (this is often the hard part).
• Loop through each URL in the PDF. For each one:
• • Automate or use the equivalent of the browser's print to PDF function to do the download

I've managed this in the past with a combination of some python code (selenium and requests modules) or something like wget, and wkhtmltopdf, which is used to do the PDF conversion bit. Pretty clunky solution overall though.

There are a few ideas on the idea portal around bulk export to PDF and other formats. Most of them have been closed, but this one is still open, so may be worth a vote.