Service Portal Category inside a category

[shembop]

We are looking to lay out our Service Portal with Categories, and sub categories, and have run into some apparent design constraints. Apparently, you cannot have a category which only contains subcategories, or it will not show up. For instance, you cannot do the following

Computer

        Laptops

                  (laptop items here)

        Desktops

                  (Desktop items here)

This creates challenges for us because of wanting to do the above example, but to also take it a step further, as we need to break out hardware offerings by region. This would be easy enough to do using categories and subcategories.

Can anyone point me in the correct direction on how ServiceNow has designed the Service Portal, and what their vision is for accomplishing this simple design?

[Brad Tilton]

You can enable nested categories in the existing service portal, although I think there's a bit of an issue with it. In order to do that, go to your catalog service page and CTRL+Right Click on the categories list and choose Instance Options from the popup.

Once you choose instance options you can configure the options for that widget. Change the category layout to Nested.

Now when you reload the page you can expand the categories by clicking on the folder icon next to the category.

The downside here is that I'm not sure how intuitive for someone to know that they need to click on the folder icon to expand the category tree.

[shembop]

That is excellent information to have. It is curious however, I am still having issues with what shows up in my list of categories, and also having issues with changing the order in how they appear. Any insight or pointing me to articles I may have missed would be greatly appreciated.

[Brad Tilton]

I don't think there's any articles around this widget specifically. Looking at the widget code I think it's ordered by category title.

[shembop]

Well that is unfortunate. Is there anything that limits the amount of items that are shown? I am trying to look in the Widget editor, and can't find anything so far.