The default behavior of our Knowledge Management application fits the needs of most of our customers. But, there seems to be a handful of features that are a source of headaches. For example, a Knowledge Base article is no longer accessible for the users after the "Valid to" date - this does not always fit into existing processes.
A common question we get, especially from small and medium businesses who don't count on a dedicated department for Knowledge Management, is whether an article can still stay visible after the "Valid to" date has passed. Then, when the customer has the time and staff for it, they can review the articles that have expired and act accordingly (either leaving the article in its inactive state or updating it to reflect any new information).
For this case, it is quite simple to create a workaround by adding a new Date type field with an expiration date on which you can filter the articles that need review (their expiration date has passed) and set the out-of-box "Valid to" date to somewhere in the far future to avoid content from "disappearing."
Add an expiration date to Knowledge Base articles so they are still visible
On the ServiceNow platform there are many ways to add a new field to a table. For this little exercise I will illustrate how to do this directly from the Knowledge Article form (you will need "admin" rights to do this).
- Right-click on the top title bar of the form to call the context menu and select "Configure > Table".
This will bring you to the table definition where you will be shown a list of the existing Columns.
- Double-click on the last row, right on the text "Insert a new row...", so you can enter the name (label) of the new field
and the column type, I have chosen "Date", but you can choose "Date/Time" if it suits your needs better.I have decided to name it "Expire by", which created a database field with the name "u_expire_by". You can check the values by hovering over the (information icon) after saving your change. It's important to take note of the "Column name" of the new field as we will need it later.
- The next step will be to add this field to the form so that the users can edit the date and save it for reference. You can find more details on how to edit forms in the official documentation (Configure a form - Istanbul release). It will look something like this:
If you want to go the extra mile, you can add the information in the KB article view, for example in the footer, like this:
You will have to edit the UI Macro named "kb_view_common_footer" and add the following code in the appropriate section, changing the knowledgeRecord.u_expire_by part for the name of the field you created:
This is the piece of code you can copy into your UI Macro.
<div id="articleExpiration" class="snc-article-footer-metadata-published">
${gs.getMessage('Expiration date: ')} ${knowledgeRecord.u_expire_by}
</div>
Please remember to replace u_expire_by with your own column name.
The finishing touch will be to change the "Valid to" and "Expiration date" values of the KB articles that need it and you will be able to filter your knowledge articles to see the content that needs review.
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