Relation VA Topic & Catalog Items

[StefanoZ]

Anyone here had same requirement to create a relationship between a Virtual Agent Topic and Catalog Items?
We have multiple teams dealing with Catalog Items buildout/review and we would like to avoid that touching some of the variables part of them, they accidentally broke also Virtual Agent Topics relying to those variables.
Virtual Agent Topics are handled by a different specific team.
How do you deal with that in your companies?

[Chris D]

Presumably you're talking about using the Cart API (or possibly some other custom way) to order catalog items via VA because if you used the ootb Order Catalog Item topic block, it wouldn't break anything if a variable wasn't supported, it would just redirect to the page to complete the regular form.

That's not a negative judgment - we have done the same thing with a couple catalog items, effectively translating them to distinct topics and not using the ootb topic block (primarily because our items are too complex to be supported natively) - but it didn't take long for me to realize the unsustainability this practice builds in and I have since refused to recreate any more catalog items in VA.

Even if you have a decent way to catch these updates to know when item-ordering topics may be broken, it's still creating extra maintenance work for something ServiceNow already has a native solution that negates the need for (almost*) any maintenance work.
*the main thing would be to just ensure that the items stays compatible with VA

In the end, we don't have a good way to deal with this and I'd recommend, if possible, instead of trying to shimmy a custom solution in to address a custom problem, you try to get ahead of it and see what you can do to get your catalog items simplified enough to use the ootb topic block.

[StefanoZ]

I agree on what you said but again...How a customer is supposed to keep track somewhere in Servicenow about which KB Articles (or Catalog Item) is in use in a defined VA Topic.

Why? Because "tomorrow" maybe our Knowledge team will retire one of those articles. How should they know that this article is in use in a VA Topic so that we can create expectations that also a VA Topic needs a review at same time?

Same stuff for Catalog Item,