Is it possible to attach a link to a catalog item from Contextual Search Results?

[Brian Bouchard]

After enabling Contextual Search on Incidents and Calls, I see when a catalog item is found by the search, our options are "Preview" and "Order"   We don't want our help desk staff filling in Service Catalog requests for items that are available, so I'm wondering if it is possible to add another option which is to include the link to the catalog item to a field in the record (similarly to embedding a link to an article)?

[Manish Vinayak1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Brian,

The "Order" action present in the Catalog Item results comes from the Search Action definition for the contextual search.

You can find those settings by navigating to the following:

Contextual Search > Table Configurations

if you open the record for Incident table, you will see the following form:

The search action configurations mention what actions are available with the results. You will see for ServiceCatalogSearchResource the action available is Order. But unfortunately, I didn't find any way to create new Search Action configuration, nor I was able to find a way to create a new search action (You can navigate to the search action record by clicking on "Order"), as it appears to be read-only, and there is no "New" button for that table.

ServiceNow documentation only mentions about modifying the existing search actions (modifications like changing label). Here is the link for the documentation:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/newyork-platform-administration/page/administer/contextual-search...

So, from what I see, I would say it won't be possible to add another action by using the out of the box components. One option could be checking the AJAX Utils which populate the details once it fetches the search results. Maybe tweak the UI Macro, to show the custom button to attach link to catalog item.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Manish

[dak]

Brian,

Were you ever able to find a solution to this problem. I would also like to modify the "Order" button on contextual searching of the Catalog Items to display an "Attach Link" 

[Brian Bouchard]

Hi dak - I did not. we opted not to alter the OBO functionality, and since we couldn't find a way to easily add this functionality, we opted to have our support desk staff walk people through getting to the catalog item.  It's not ideal, but like I said, we didn't want to alter the OOB functionality.

[dak]

Well, ServiceNow did show me the UI Macro to modify it is called: cxs_result_table

But the ui macro is "Read-only" except for ServiceNow people. So I let the idea of modifying it go.

I did find this article about removing the "Order" button and thought it might be useful, see: https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=3fd043a5db98dbc01dcaf3231f96...

I also found the "UI Page" that is used to display the catalog item when you click on the item itself from the contextual search results display. It is called: cxs_cat_item

I then modified this page to display a "Permalink" the catalog item, which i hope the consultants can use to cut-and-paste the correct url for the end-user to get them to the catalog item easier than walking them to it.