KB article showing differently for different users

mbourla · ‎12-19-2016

I've got a KB article which I updated a few weeks ago. It looks fine when viewed as an admin user or as a normal ITIL user (other than me), but when I'm logged in (or impersonating) my own ITIL account I still see the old version.

The KB article requires ITIL role, which my own ITIL account definitely has.

This happens on different browsers (Chrome, IE), or in an incognito browser window (which suggests not a browser caching issue).

It's the same on a test instance which has just been created as a clone of our Production instance (which suggests it's not a ServiceNow caching issue).

Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks!
Michael

mbourla · ‎12-20-2016

Many thanks to everyone for your responses - appreciated.

From some experimentation, it seems to be that some sys_user records have an invalid value of 'NUL' for Language. It's showing up in blue. Whereas is should be English or empty. The vast majority of the sys_user records have no Language defined. Seems that it's only a whole pile of older records that have that invalid value.

Empirically from trying one or two it seems that users with that invalid Language setting get the old KB article version. If I change Language from NUL to be empty on a user record, they then see the newer version of the article. First time I did have to do a cache.do, but the next time I didn't - don't know why.

There isn't a language field on KB articles (I assume that means we don't have the KB Internationalization plugin enabled), but I assume it still somehow looks at the user's Language. What I don't know is where it's getting the old version of the KB article from - I can't see it myself anywhere, but it definitely is.

So... that does seem to be the cause of the problem. I'll get all 8000 or so offending Language values cleared, and possibly with a cache.do that should sort it out!

View solution in original post

purbali1 · ‎12-19-2016

Has the KB article been published?

mbourla · ‎12-19-2016

Yes it has. Have tried making it draft and republishing, but that made no difference. Tried changing a few field on the article (Category and Knowledge Base), and also no difference.

The Last Modified date at the top is being updated when I view the changed page, but the actual content is showing the previous version.

The Permalink shown at the bottom is the same on the correct page (e.g. as my admin account) as on the incorrect page (as my ITIL account).

Very strange!

Shahed Shah1 · ‎12-19-2016

I'm wondering if this could be down to languages. I've seen issues where some customers change the instance language (glide.sys.language) to "uk" as an alternative to "en" so that their Instance can have Internationalized English as opposed to American English. (This is actually wrong to do, by the way, as this code is for Ukraine.)

What would happen is that a record was getting inserted into the sys_translated_text table, so some users would end up seeing this "translation" rather than the actual text. Or the other way round depending on perspective.

I suggest having a look at this table by filtering on the Document field, which is the Sys ID of the record getting "translated". If you get a record here, does it reflect the new or old text?

RajNow · ‎12-20-2016

Hi zirnhelt or rakesh_ravi - have you come across this issue ?