How to Remove Popular Items on the Service Portal or Redirect to a different Category on the Service Portal

[Ishaan Shoor]

Recently I came across a requirement at a client to remove the popular items from the Service Portal or you can redirect the users to a category altogether. I went through the community and found that most of the solutions talk about making changes in the widget or adding a defaulted category to the widget.

This is not required as the widget takes the sys_id of the category as a URL parameter.

By default, there's no sys_id passed which is why the user sees "Popular items". So, instead of making changes to the widget. We can simply pass the sys_id of a category in the instance options of the icon-link which solve the problem and default it to a different category without any changes to the widget and solves the business problem. 

Please find the screenshots below for your reference. 

1) Instance options for the icon-link: Use the URL type and add the URL similar to the below. 

The portal here - "sp"  
The page name -  "sc_category" which holds the SC Category widget.
URL parameter - "sys_id" of the category you want to default the widget.
Note: If no sys_id parameter is passed it will display the popular items.  

2) Once the above changes are done click on the icon-link. 

It will open up the category instead of popular items. 

Thanks & Regards,

Ishaan

[carleen]

@Ishaan ShoorDid you ever get any feedback on how well this worked out? What happens when users click the "Service Catalog" link in the breadcrumbs (in your second screenshot)?

I don't have a problem with Popular Items, but it shows Catalog Items from Catalogs that aren't part of this Portal's configuration (which I believe is more of a defect but would take some time to fix if accepted by ServiceNow). I think my only option is to clone the SC Category Page widget to hide the Popular Items altogether or restrict them by this Portal's Catalogs.

[Ishaan Shoor]

@carleen Oh is it? Haven't dealt with a scenario where popular items was showing an catalog item from catalogs which aren't a part of particular portals configuration. 

Regarding your feedback, the changes I made to redirect users to a specific category instead of popular items was exactly what the customer wanted. They were facing an issue where users were being lazy and using a generic catalog item called "Non-standard request" for all their requests(as it came on top in the popular items).

The customer aim was to reduce this behavior and encourage the use of actual catalog items for specific requests. Now, if users needs to request specific items, they can navigate to different categories and choose from the available items that meets the needs. Therefore, That's why I didn't clone or make changes to the widget. However, based on the issue you're currently facing, it seems like you might need to clone or make changes to the widget. Hope this helps? 

Regards,
Ishaan

[Kyle Brown]

@carleen Is the issue with items from other catalogues showing specific to Order Guides?

This was a defect introduced with San Diego as part of an update to the code designed to address performance issues, and SN are claiming to fix it in Utah.

Service Portal: 'Popular Items' widget shows Order Guides from different catalogs which are not part...

[carleen]

@Kyle BrownThanks! I found that later after finding the glide.sc.portal.popular_items.optimize property in the widget code (then I went on vacation; hence the delayed reply here). It was an Order Guide, but I didn't make that correlation until I saw that known error KB article, because, for this customer, it is the only exposed "Catalog Item" in their Catalog. We are working strictly within our scope(s), so we had to make a copy of the widget anyway that we plan to revert once the customer upgrades to Utah (assuming it's fixed).

Page route maps have helped us tremendously as well, as the customer has customized the OOTB sc_category and sc_cat_item pages in ways that don't map well to our portals usage. There isn't a lot of documentation on these, so I'm just mentioning them in case others are searching for solutions.