Displaying a knowledge article using "View article" related link is shows differently

[Ashley Heath]

I'm hoping there's an easy solution to this but when we're creating knowledge articles and want to see how it will display in our /ESC portal we've found that we cannot rely on the "View article" link under Related Links when creating the article. Using this link previews the article using the width of the browser window, but once the article is published and you view the article from the /ESC portal the view is much different.

We end up having to publish the article, view it in /ESC, check it out, edit, republish, and continue this cycle until it views the way we want it to in /ESC which creates a lot of email spam to the knowledge managers. Is there a way to see how the article will display in /ESC before publishing so that we can avoid the cycle described above?

Many thanks for any advice on this.

[Narendran Dhana]

Hi Ashley, 

May i know, did you managed to solve this?

Regards, 

Narendran

[Ashley Heath]

Unfortunately, no. The only workaround we came up with was to draft the KB article and "preview" it in ECP before fully publishing. I say "preview" because as knowledge admin/managers we can go to https://<instance>/esc?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=<KB number> and are able to see the articles in draft status so we can see how they look within the portal without fully publishing them.

Then we can make any necessary tweaks to the articles, save the changes, and refresh the browser to see the updates and once we're happy with everything we publish them so everyone else can see them.

[John Dahl]

Here is a bookmarklet that you can use to automatically open an article in the service portal view. To add this to your browser:

1. Create a new bookmark and give it a friendly name, something like "Open article in Portal"
2. Paste this into the URL field: 

javascript:var f=window.frames["gsft_main"]!==undefined?window.frames["gsft_main"].g_form:g_form;top.open("/esc?id=kb_article&sysparm_article="+f.getValue("number"));

Now when you have the article open in the editing page, click the bookmarklet and the article will open in a new tab in the /esc portal view. You can update the portal to any that are defined in your system, such as /sp or /csm.

Note: This works best when the bookmarklet is in the bookmarks toolbar and when the toolbar is visible.

[Ashley Heath]

Thank you for the information, John. I tried creating a bookmark using the code you provided above, but it won't let me and says "invalid URL". I tried creating this in Chrome but will try another browser to see if that works.