Retiring a Draft Knowledge Article

[DavidBReynolds]

Hello everyone

Is there a way to retire an article in Draft status, especially with an expired Valid to date?

I'm finding many of these articles in our knowledge bases written by former employees. I would like to clean them up but I cannot seem to do it.

I might be missing a permission or now know the correct way retire them.

In some situations, I can click Delete to remove the most recent version. When that happens, I have the option to retire them. However, once an article expires, that method no longer works.

Thanks for your comments and suggestions.

FYI: We are using the Xanadu release.

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Hi David, 

You are unable to Retire a draft article, as the workflow doesn't work like that. The only option is to "Delete" the draft, that should then return the article to it's most recent version, i.e. the Published version. You will then be able to retire the Published article. The Valid To Date will have no impact on the Workflow of the article, as the Valid to date is mainly used to determine if an article shows for end users when searching. If you are unable to retire an article that is in a Published workflow because it has a Valid to date in the past, this would most likely be a customisation, as Out of the Box, any article in a Published state should be able to be retired (assuming you have publish/retire access and the knowledge base workflow allows you to). 

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[tajinderpal]

@DavidBReynolds  Use a Script to Clean Up Old Drafts:

var gr = new GlideRecord('kb_knowledge');
gr.addQuery('workflow_state', 'draft'); // Only draft articles
gr.addQuery('valid_to', '<', gs.now()); // Already expired
gr.query();
while (gr.next()) {

gs.info('Deleting Draft Article: ' + gr.number + ' - ' + gr.short_description);
gr.deleteRecord(); // Delete it
}

Important: Test in a sub-production instance first!

[Arnaldo]

Hi David

We have configured and activated an archive rule for draft articles not touched since 3 months.

Archive rule has option to destroy archived records after a period (we have set 3 more months).

Unfortunately this doesn't solve the problem to retire article if a draft version is there.

The only OOTB option I know, is to delete the draft version first and retire published one  even with expired valid to date.

Cheers 

Arnaldo

[Rum]

I've tried to Retire Draft version, but no option available for that. I had to delete the articles. One thing I ran into and created a minor issue was one of the articles was created by a contractor (vendor) when we implemented ServiceNow a few years ago. For some reason, when I deleted the article, all images disappeared from all the current and old version of the article. Fortunately, I've exported the article into .pdf format which I was able to recreate the KB article and put in the images.