How can an individual user set a preference 'select_decorations'? It's causing unwanted behavior on the display of the theme/app/update selector.

[aaisbe]

Question:

Consider this a priority level low, SN nerd sleuth level high

Does anyone know how a user preference titled select_decorations could be set by an end user? We have a small number of users which over the last 1.5 years have records inserted to sys_user_preference for this property. There is no association to their job function, time that the inserts occurred, or overall relationship that we can establish.

We are trying to identify the root cause of how this can be set in order to understand the platform better to prevent this type of downstream impact in the future. Using a technical solution such as a business rule would only solve it for this case without understanding the real root of the issue.

No hi ticket has been entered, I wanted to see what the community had to say first.

I did catch one reference to this property on snguru in the comments that indicates this property and the type of behavior has presented an issue for someone else before. http://www.servicenowguru.com/system-ui/ui-scripts-system-ui/single-click-impersonation-return/

Background:

SN Version: Eureka

We noted some unexpected behavior with a few users with how the theme, app, and update set selector are displayed.   The only users we could identify impacted were an admin roled user and an update_set_picker roled user.They had no ability to see the drop down lists to make changes to this options, although they could see all the content above that point.

We started investigating and eventually wound up looking at the output HTML and discovered a CSS property being set for display which was different between users who were not affected and these two users. The span element displaying those drop downs had a CSS display property of none for the element "span_decorations".   CSS Display and Visibility

We knew this had to be coming from the instance since it was not occurring for other users and found that in sys_user_preference we had four total users with values set for the property select_decorations. Two were inline and two were none. This matched the two users having problems and the others with settings not set to none had no problem.   We then replicated this issue on our other instances and the current servicenow demo instance by following these steps.

Replicate:

Identify a user and go to sys_user_preference to create a record for them with the following fields set

name: select_decorations

type: string

value: none

User: <selected user>

Now impersonate or log in as this user and select the gear icon to change theme and note that the area is not populated. Deleting or changing the value of none on the user preference will bring back to the normal behavior.

Aaron

NC SNUG Member & President!

Ben Hollifield may be interested in this?

[ben_hollifield · Accepted solution]

Calling me out directly now, eh, Isbell?

Well, I can tell you the typical way this setting is changed - it is via the small arrow in the upper-right-hand portion of the menu bar. Clicking that will hide all of the drop-downs in the header. Clicking it again will reveal them. I imagine your folks are inadvertently clicking that?

[aaisbe]

Thanks! Ben Hollifield. I only call you out, because I'm so used to saying your name with all the shout outs I contintually give you for your awesome work. I mean seriously, more people should know about Dynamic Knowledge Search v2 - YouTube.

I have one follow up question. Do you know of a way to toggle this setting in U14? Otherwise I might like to make a suggestion in a hi ticket or wherever proper place to add it to upgrade checklist or make a change to set the users back to a default.

So here's the probable scenario.

Instance is on Dublin

• User sets select_decorations by clicking UI icon to hide update_set list, application, etc

Instance upgraded to Dublin

• User who previously made setting change to set select_decorations to none, now has no ability to see icon

I took a few screencaps on the user I made this change to on demochannel.service-now.com (Abel Tuter). There was no visual way I saw to change or modify it.

Before select_decorations set to none

After select_decorations set to none

[rschuhler]

Hey Aaron and Ben,

Per my recent HI ticket on the subject, this appears to be an OOB issue and has been captured in PRB606030. Thanks to both of you for the updates, I would offer to buy you guys lunch, but we both know that Ben is too busy being a world travel now...

[ben_hollifield]

You guys are funny!

Aaron - Thanks for bringing this to my attention - I did not realize it had been removed in UI14! It's difficult to add UI attributes to the base interface, so there isn't a great way to custom-code a solution. Sure, you could add UI actions or links to do the job (maybe a 'Script' type module in the left nav to do the job?), but I assume this will be quickly resolved in a Eureka patch or hotfix.

Rick - I'd love to get together with you gents any time! But, yeah, I'm on the west coast this week...