Service portal category not appearing on public portal

[k_lutz]

The category has one catalog item which is NOT public but we would still like the category to appear in the listing. It has user criteria for a certain set of internal users but the requester was asking if it would still display to be consistent with the "look" on the internal page when the category does appear.

Using the SC Category widget without modifications other than the configuration settings. From the code, it seems like it should if the canView is set to false that it should just do a count of active items to decide to appear or not.

Know this is not really standard but any idea what I could look at to see if this would still have the category appear even if the catalog item is not accessible to public users?

[AshishKM]

Hi @k_lutz ,

Can you please share some screen shots of category definitaion page along with applied user criteria.

-Thanks,
AshishKM

[k_lutz]

Hi Ashish,

Posted some pics in the Word doc. Please let me know if that helps. I know its an odd request but on a fact finding mission.

Kurt

[jMarshal · Accepted solution]

This is normal OOB behaviour, if a user doesn't have access to any items in a category, they will not see the category.

I would advise against adjusting that OOB behaviour as it is core behaviour and can have a massive "trickle down effect".

Instead, if I were in your shoes, were you absolutely must have all end-users see a specific category which may not have items available to any given end-user, based on user criteria, I'd create a "stub item" (so-to-speak) which would be "can view" for everyone. This "stub item" would be treated similar to a stub KB article that acts as "additional information" feature about the category and what people may see there (perhaps this would shed some light on why an end user may not see anything else in this category).

This "stub item" can be configured to have no variables and if "requested/submitted", the flow just closes whatever task is assigned, sending an email with the same "additional information" that was presented when the end-user looked at it in the first place. Just make sure your messaging is clear in the "stub item" and this should work just fine as no-code solution!

[k_lutz]

Thanks. I was wondering if there was something I could do...without having to touch the code or make a clone. I will try this as a test. I was thinking of having something that lets the user know that more options are available when logged into the system tham viewing the catalog as a non-authenticated user.