Accessing a knowledge article from the CMS results in an error message

[maja_jovanovic]

Sometimes I get customer reports of an error when trying to open "Most Read" or "Common Answers" in the Knowledge Block Menu. After clicking on the link under the "Common Answers" or "Most Read" categories, the knowledge article opens with the following error "The page you are looking for could not be found."

If the user tries to open the same article from the left sidebar list under "Common Answers" there is no error and the article can be accessed without any issue.

Knowledge category: "Common Answers"	Left sidebar "Common Answers"

The issue when trying to access a knowledge article from the CMS is related to the URL and as stated in the error, the specific page that we are trying to access that doesn't exists or doesn't belong to the current site we are in. The best way to find the cause of the error is to do a step-by-step investigation.

How to access a knowledge article from the CMS:

1. Click under Knowledge "Common Answers" Category and page that displays this contents is common_answer ( /ess/common_answers.do).
2. Check the configuration for this page and content of the page.
3. Navigate to Content Management application and Pages module. In filter select URL suffix is common_answers.
4. Open this page and click on Related link Edit Page.
5. Find the "Common Answers" Content Block on page and click on pencil icon in the left corner of the block to edit it:

   

6. Click on the reference icon next to the Type field. It usually is list_knowledge_ui macro selected, as this is the OOB value.

In most cases this should be able to use a UI macro that has some jelly code to display knowledge article links and a URL behind those links.

The issue is related to code starting with: <a href=

If this issue occurs and the error in the URL of the browser looks like <your_instance_name>.service-now.com/ess/main_content.do &sysparm_document_key=kb_knowledge,sys_id_of_article you may need to do some adjusting.

To clarify, the assumption is that the CMS site being used is an OOB ESS (out-of-box employee self service) page, but could be any of your company sites created under Content Management > Sites. The main_content will be specific to your case, but OOB should show as being knowledge.do. The other part of the URL is the sys ID of the article. This will come off as being sys_id_of_article.

In the case of the error above page main_content.do, it doesn't exist at all or it doesn't exist for that ESS site. Ideally, your UI macro should have <a href=main_content.do. If this is the case than all you need to do is either replace 'main_content.do' with 'knowledge.do' or create page 'main_content' in Content Management > Pages.

Remember to select the Content site field on the page form you are using (in this example that would be the ESS page). If the page exists but is not in the current site, I would recommend either changing the page or creating a new one that is similar to OOB page knowledge.do.