Help creating service catalog items and approvals (or not)

[John Lockwood]

Yes I am new to ServiceNow, yes it is a powerful tool able to do many things but it seems one of the basic areas - the service catalog is (almost) a broken design.

I say this because I am currently unable to achieve what I want to do and feel I should have (easily) been able to do and having done a fair amount of searching for articles also seems based on numerous articles to be a terrible design in ServiceNow.

As I see it one should be able to define a Service Catalog Request. This request should be able to be defined as to whether it needs approval or not.

A Service Catalog Request might in turn 'contain' multiple items, each item in turn should be definable as to whether it needs approval or not.

Also it should be possible to define a Service Catalog Request approval to approve those multiple Service Items belonging to the Service Catalog Request.

What seems to be broken is that I cannot see any way to make a Service Catalog Request that does not need an approval. It is not even obviously clear how one links items to requests - that is if one wants to have a request for a new starter and that would include a laptop, a mobile phone, a monitor, etc. all part of the request but clearly being items in their own right. More relevantly to me attaching things like account access 'items' to a request, e.g. VPN access, GitHub access, etc. to a new user account request.

To keep things more simple so that people have a greater chance of helping me what I specifically want to do is the following -

• Have an item that a user can 'order' from the Self Service Catalog
• This item to be a request to perform a single action on a user account (the actual action is not important)
• This should go to an approval group and the first person to approve it or reject it sets the approval state
• If approved then Catalog tasks would follow on in the workflow

Now in our official ServiceNow Test environment, it seems that a Service Catalog Request stage of 'waiting for approval' is added and immediately and automatically approved - this happens whether or not I define an approver or approval group for the Service Catalog Item, this results in a notification to the requester saying your request has been approved - even though it hasn't something a lot of other people have complained about. In our Live environment it also adds an initial approval stage but always sits waiting for approval - it does not send a notification to the approver or approval group or requestor, the requestor only gets the normal notification saying the request has been opened.

Note: I have a workflow I have created and set the Service Catalog Item to use, and in my workflow I have the approval steps included with branches for accept and reject. In the test instance having automatically 'approved' the REQnnnnnn approval stage it starts the workflow and sits waiting for my workflow approval  i.e. a RITMnnnnnn to be approved and it does send out the notification to the approvers - on my test instance the only problem is the extra approval stage which is auto approved and generating a notification to that effect. On my live instance it sits waiting at this initial REQnnnnnn approval stage and does not send out a notification to the approvers and does not appear to start the workflow.

• I want the request to be opened,
• The requestor to be notified
• The workflow to start
• The approver(s) to be notified they need to approve
• If approved the requestor to be notified 
• the rest of the workflow to be processed 

I do not want or need this extra approval stage from the REQnnnnnnn but it clearly would be useful to know how to do or not do this.

Some comments suggest a Catalog Item can have a tick-box to say it needs approval or not - I have not seen this anywhere. Some comments suggest yes the built-in business rules are FUBAR and you need to disable them. However details are sorely lacking and as always - a picture paints a thousand words.

I am running Kingston. I am using the sc_req_item table but open minded to alternatives if they would do what I need.

I have managed to do other things in ServiceNow such as scheduled tasks to automatically create Helpdesk tickets, I have even made a Scoped App to create an entire set of tickets (on a regular basis) for a group based on my own table. So I feel I have some knowledge of ServiceNow.

[sanjay36]

John,

Did you check the properties of the workflow in both the instances. Is it created on sc_req_item and i would suggest comparing the workflow rendering in both the workflows to see if they are matiching . If Not that will be the issue.

If yes, would you need the workflow to be autoApproved ?

and progress for catalog Tasks.

Thanks,

Sanjay

[John Lockwood]

Yes the properties are the same except very minor things like stage names and priorities. Both have the same stage rendering settings. Both are using the sc_req_item table.

However as mentioned the Test one auto approves the REQnnnnnn waiting for approval stage (whether I like it or not) and the Live one is stuck on waiting for approval on that stage as per previous pictures.

If I had to guess with my limited ServiceNow experience I would have thought it might be a business rule or something similar on the table on the Live one is not auto-approving, whereas the Test one is.

I did try creating another very basic workflow on the live one and also a new Service Catalog item and it also did not auto approve the approval. 

[John Lockwood]

It turned out that the reason my live instance was not processing the Service Catalog item unlike my test instance and hence not triggering my workflow is that someone had deleted the standard built-in Service Catalog workflow on the live instance. Once this was copied as XML from the test to the live to restore it this fixed that issue.