Creating and publishing specification versions

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated April 14, 2026
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Creating and publishing specification versions

    Creating and publishing specification versions in your ServiceNow product catalog enables you to reflect engineering improvements and changes to your products, services, and resources. This process ensures that your catalog items stay current with updates related to how items are sold, configured, and delivered. By maintaining updated specification versions, your agents can offer the latest, more marketable products—including complementary, upgraded, or related offerings—to your customers.

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    Creating Specification Versions for Product Offerings

    As a product catalog manager, you create and assign version numbers to the affected product, service, or resource specifications and product offerings. You update characteristics, characteristic options, specification relationships, decomposition rules, quantity mappings, and attribute propagation rules to mirror engineering changes. Additionally, you create new product offerings or update existing ones and retire or archive outdated versions to keep your catalog optimized and relevant.

    Data Copying and Validation during Version Creation

    When creating a new specification version based on a published one, the system duplicates essential fields such as category, type, description, product code, cost, and others while resetting the external version field. It automatically increments the version number and assigns display names reflecting the new version. Associated characteristics, characteristic options, specification relationships, decomposition rules, quantity mappings, and attribute propagation rules are also copied and updated to reference current versions.

    Publishing and Validation Checks

    Upon publishing a new specification version, ServiceNow AI Platform® validates that all rules remain consistent with updated characteristics and options. You must resolve any errors related to invalid specification versions or characteristics before you can publish. Common validation errors involve outdated references in specification relationships, decomposition rules, attribute mappings, and propagation rules. The system provides guidance to update or remove invalid elements to ensure integrity and accuracy of the catalog.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Keep product catalogs aligned with engineering improvements and market demands.
    • Enable sales agents to offer the latest and most appealing product versions.
    • Maintain consistency and accuracy in product specifications and related rules.
    • Simplify catalog management by archiving outdated versions responsibly.
    • Leverage built-in validation to prevent configuration errors before publishing.

    Create and publish the specification versions that list the improved products and services that you can offer to your customers in a technical product catalog.

    Your product catalogs define the products, services, and resources available to your customers so they can decide what to purchase from you. Your catalog items will continue to evolve over time to accommodate the changes that are related to how your items are sold, configured, and delivered to your customers. Typically, these changes are related to engineering improvements that make the products, services, and resources more marketable and appealing to your customers. The changes usually are to the fit, form and function, characteristics, and characteristic options, and specification relationships of your catalog items. For example, a home internet product may evolve over multiple revisions to support changes that are related to pricing and increased internet speeds.

    By creating new specification and product offering versions for your products, you enable your agents to work with the latest versions. Agents can then sell more expensive, complementary, upgraded, or related products to your customers.

    Creating specification versions for use in product offerings

    As a product catalog manager, you do the following actions when you create a version of a specification for use in a product offering:

    1. Create and assign a version number in each of the product, service, or resource specifications or product offering records that are affected by the changes.
    2. Create the required specification relationships, decomposition rules, and attribute mappings for each specification in the new version. As a product catalog manager, you update the following information to reflect the engineering changes that were made to the associated specifications:
      • Characteristics
      • Characteristic options
      • Specification relationships
      • Decomposition rules
      • Quantity mappings
      • Attribute propagation rules
      Note:
      To learn more, see Create and publish a specification version.
    3. Create a product offering, and then publish it when you update your product catalog. To learn more, see Create and publish a product offering version.
    4. Retire or archive old or unused specifications, and product offerings. To learn more, see Retiring or archiving versioned specifications and product offerings.

    Updates and validations that are performed when you create and publish a specification version

    When you create a version for a currently published specification, the system copies the following data into, or populates, the new specification record as follows:

    1. Copies the following fields with these basic specification details:
      • Category
      • Type
      • Start and End date
      • Description
      • External ID
      • Product code and Product line
      • Cost to Company
      • Composite
      • Installation Required
      • Location-specific
    2. Blanks out the External Version field.
      Note:
      The External ID and External Version fields don't appear on the specification forms by default but can be added by changing the form layouts.
    3. Populates the following fields with the detailed information that you enter for the new specification version:
      • Version. The next incremental number appears.
      • Display Name. The display name is the system-assigned concatenation of the specification name and its current version number. You can overwrite this field.
      • Initial Version. The name of the base version of the specification appears but can't be changed.
      • Previous Version. The name of the specification is as it was in the previous version.
    4. Copies the associated characteristic and characteristic options. To learn more, see Create the characteristics and characteristic options for your product offerings.
    5. Copies the associated specification relationships, attribute mapping, decomposition rules, and quantity mappings when you use extension point scripts. When copied, the source specifications in the associated specification relationship and decomposition rule records are automatically updated to the current versions of the source specifications.
      Note:
      To learn more about these rules, see Create specification relationships, quantity mapping, and decomposition rules for Order Management.
    6. Copies the associated quantity mappings and attribute propagation rules. The source specifications in the quantity mappings and attribute propagation rules are also updated to the current versions. To learn more about these rules, see .

    When you publish the updated specification version, the ServiceNow AI Platform® performs validations on your edits. These validations ensure that all rules are valid with the characteristic and characteristic options that are available for the new specification version. An error might occur if you modify the characteristics referenced by the other rules that are associated with the new specification version. If an error occurs, a message similar to this example appears.

    Copied rules validation errors

    You can publish a new specification version only after you resolve all errors. This table contains some possible validation errors that you may see and the actions you can take to resolve the issue.
    Table 1. Copied rules validation errors and resolution actions
    Error Resolution actions
    Invalid specification version in the specification relationship. Update the source specification version to the current version:
    1. Select Specification Characteristics.
    2. Update the Source Specification field in the Specification Relationships form.
    Invalid specification versions in the decomposition rule. Update the source specification version to the current version:
    1. Select Specification Relationships.
    2. Update the Source Specification field in the Specification Relationships form.
    Invalid characteristic in the decomposition rule. Update or remove the invalid characteristic in the Decomposition Rules form:
    1. Select Specification Characteristics.
    2. Update or remove any invalid characteristics.
    Invalid characteristic options in the decomposition rule. Update or remove the invalid characteristic options in the Decomposition Rules form:
    1. Select Specification Characteristics.
    2. Update or remove any invalid characteristic options.
    Invalid characteristic options in the quantity rule. Update or remove the invalid characteristic options in the Attribute Mappings form:
    1. Select Attribute Mappings.
    2. Update or remove any invalid characteristic options.
    Invalid specification version in the attribute propagation rule. Update the Source Specification field in the Attribute Propagation form to the current version.
    Invalid characteristic in the attribute mapping rule. Update or remove the invalid characteristics in the Attribute Mappings form:
    1. Select Attribute Mappings.
    2. Update or remove any invalid characteristics.