Service Catalog Request Trigger for Flow Designer?

[simonvolkwe]

Hello Service Now Community,

I am relatively new to Service now and have tried to create an approval flow for a Service Catalogue Request. I had big problems with the Request not triggering the flow in my system.

In the flow designer it says that the flow is triggered when a user submits the Service Request. See picture below

(Trigger assignment in Flow Designer)

However, this is not quite correct, is it?

For the flow to start, the business rule ‘StartFlowDesigner Flow’ must be executed (see image below)

But this is only started if the Requested Item Stage is set to Approved.

Is there a reason for this?

Because it is not really what is mentioned in the description for the Service Request Flow Trigger.

I have now changed the rule so that flows are started which have ‘waiting_for_approval’ as the stage (which is the default value for sc_req_item.stage) but I am not sure whether this implementation makes sense as I am adapting a predefined business rule.

I know I could use a second flow to handle the approvals apart from the rest of the fullfilment. But isn't that inefficient and inconvenient instead of using the service request submit as a real trigger?

I'm looking for the reason behind this decision, as it seems like many developers have encountered this problem in the last years.

A few forum posts with the same/similar problem:

- Solved: Flow Designer not Triggering for Service Catalog R... - ServiceNow Community (2019)

- Solved: flow designer is not triggering an approval - ServiceNow Community (2021)

- Solved: Flow Designer does not trigger service catalog tri... - ServiceNow Community (2022)

- Solved: How to run Flow Designer by Catalog Item request - ServiceNow Community (2024)

Thank you in advance! ^^

[simonvolkwe · Accepted solution]

I think i now slowly understand the concept behind this.

So a Requested Item gets submitted/requested when the associated Request approval field changes to approved. And not when I submit the Catalog item inside the Service Portal.

That is very confusing as we submit/request/order the Catalog Item in the Service Portal... through a Button with the same name. But it will just start a Request and not submit the Requested Item.

[JenniferRah]

I don't think that is how it works out of the box. If it is working that way in your instance, you may have made some customizations.

We hide the Requests from our users (because it confused them), so they never really do anything with the Request. When they submit a catalog item, it creates the Request and the Requested Item and the Flow kicks off on the RITM. They don't have to do anything to the Request for that to start.