Part of having a complete and useful Service Catalog is maintaining the items and categories in the catalog. If information is organized logically, users can order items easily and quickly. Many catalog administrators incorporate base system items and categories into their service catalog, especially when first creating their catalog.
These base system items and categories are fairly common, for example:
- base system items (found by navigating to Service Catalog > Catalog Definitions > Maintain Items) include Paper and Supplies and Office Keys
- base system categories (found by navigating to Service Catalog > Catalog Definitions > Maintain Categories) include Services and Printers
If your instance is running on later versions of Eureka or Fuji, or the early versions of Geneva you may experience an issue when updating a base system service catalog item (sc_cat_item) or category (sc_category). The updates are only visible on the application node where you are logged in, not on other nodes. This can prevent your updates from being seen by all catalog users.
Upgrading to Fuji Patch 13, Geneva Patch 5, or Helsinki can help you avoid this issue. But before you do that, use the steps below to confirm that you are experiencing this issue.
Testing to see if updates to a base system service catalog item are visible on multiple nodes:
- Ensure that the Use 'User Criteria' to define access to catalog items and categories system property is set to Yes.
- Navigate to Service Catalog > Catalog Definitions > User Criteria.
- Create a new criteria and specify a single company in the Companies field.
- Navigate to Service Catalog > Catalog Definitions > Maintain items.
- Select any base system catalog item.
- In Available for, click New or double-click Insert a new row. You may need to configure the form and add the Available for field.
- Select the new user criteria created in step 3.
- Save the catalog item record.
- Impersonate a user that does not work for the company specified in step 3.
- Navigate to the Service Catalog and try to order the item specified in step 5. The item does not appear.
Have you tried flushing the cache?
You can work around this issue by flushing the cache after making changes to catalog items or categories. Do any of the following to call a script that immediately starts flushing your database cache:
- navigate to the following location on your instance: https://<instance name>.service-now.com/cache.do
- in the Application Navigator, type cache.do in the Filter navigator
- in the Application Navigator, navigate to System Diagnostics > Cache Flush
Because a cache flush can affect performance and system response times, perform them during non-business hours.
Additional information:
- The ServiceNow product documentation contains general information about Service Catalog, Service Catalog properties, and the cache:
