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]

I don't think there are any controls that would allow that oob, but you could always copy the widget and then edit it to make it do what you want.

What exactly are you looking to do?

[shembop]

I'm trying to figure out why some categories are showing up, and others are not. I have limited what was exposed, and I can see the number of categories decrease, but certain categories simply are not showing up, even after turning on nesting. I can't see any difference in the setup of the categories.

[shembop]

Brad, I did a little more testing, and the nesting is not the silver bullet. In your example, you have items listed under hardware, which is why it works. If I add a dummy catalog item under the category of computers, then it will show up on my list of categories, and the nested categories show up. No catalog item in Computer category- it does not show up in the list in the SP.

[Brad Tilton]

I'm not quite following. I believe the way it works is that if you click on one of the categories on the left, then any items in that category will show up on the right. OOB all of the items in the hardware subcategories are also in the hardware category (you can relate an item to multiple categories).

[shembop]

So, think of it this way.

North America

        - Hardware

                  - Computers

Europe

        - Hardware

                  - Computers

In the scenario you mentioned, I would have to have everything (or at least one item) show up under the North America and the Europe categories or they wouldn't show up at all.