Redirect links to other knowledge articles based on where it's viewed?

[Erik24]

Hi,

Is it possible OOB to have users viewing a knowledge article and clicking a link to another knowledge article to be redirected depending on which UI they are viewing the article from?

I.e. if a user is viewing the article from back-end/internal view (kb_view) the link leads to the back-end view of the linked article, and if you're viewing from Service Portal (kb_article_view) you're directed to the Portal view of the same article.

We have a recently released an internal Service Portal and published a bunch of knowledge articles. In a later release of the SP the URL was changed, which broke all links between articles. As changes to the SP, including URLs, theoretically could happen again, I'm curious to know if broken links could be avoided? Or is there another better way to handle linking between KB articles?

It would also help when managing articles to not have to fetch the SP link when managing from back-end/internal view.

I've not found any existing information on this exact issue, so I hope to get some support here. 🙂

Thankful for any input!

[Lorenzo Stermie]

Hello Erik,
In my experience if you use the permalinks you stay on the UI that you are on.

What's the hyperlink format you are using to link your articles?

[Erik24]

Hey Lorenzo,

For the Service Portal we used the permalink copied from that UI.

https://<instance.service-now.com>/sp?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0012345

When the SP URL changed, all links within articles were broken. Which is why I was thinking about using the internal instead, as that is not likely to change.

But the internal link does not have the same UI as in the SP. I also tried this in my PDI and the results were the same.

Do you have some customization to work around this or am I just doing it wrong (I'm quite new to the platform so that might definitely be the case)?

Thanks for your reply 🙂

[Lorenzo Stermie]

Hello Erik,
I understand now what you are facing.
First I will recommend that you use the base permalink (not a portal one) the reason for this is that permissions to articles are always controlled at a Knowledge level but you could add your knowledge bases to different portals that may have different restrictions, using the base permalink will help you avoid this should your instance develop in any such way in the future.

Now to fix the issue at hand what I have done in the past is export the knowledge base in a CSV file (don't open it in excel rather use a text editor like notepadd++ or something similar as excel will crop the field length )

From there you can easily find where the "broken" hyperlink are nested and you can go update those articles in the Knowledge base.

Unfortunately I don't know of any automation to solve this.

Hope this helps

Lorenzo

[Erik24]

Thank you, I will do as you suggest and have a talk with our developers regarding any issues with what UI the users are directed to.