Features

ServiceNow connector features:

  • Retrieval of supported elements using the RESTful API.
  • Basic authentication.

Retrieved Content

Currently, the ServiceNow connector retrieves the following types of documents:

  • Knowledge Articles and Attachments
  • Catalog Items and Attachments


Table Usage

Knowledge Content

To retrieve Knowledge content, the connector accesses the tables:

  • kb_knowledge: Table with the Knowledge Articles.
  • kb_category: Table with the details of the article’s category.
  • kb_knowledge_base: Table for the Knowledge Base information.
  • sys_attachment: Table to extract attachments.
  • sys_attachment_doc: Table to extract attachments.
  • kb_uc_cannot_read_mtom: Table to relate Cannot Read user criteria and Knowledge Bases.
  • kb_uc_can_read_mtom: Table to relate Can Read user criteria and Knowledge Bases.
  • kb_uc_can_contribute_mtom: Table to relate Can Contribute user criteria and Knowledge Bases.
  • sys_user_role: Table to extract the Public role sys id.
  • user_criteria: Table of user criteria.
  • sys_user: Table with the detail of users (Used for author details).

The roles needed to access these tables are: Knowledge, Knowledge_Admin and User_Admin or Itil.

Catalog Content

To retrieve Catalog Items’ content, the connector accesses the tables:

  • sc_cat_item: Table with the Catalog Items.
  • sc_category: Table with the details of the Catalog item’s category.
  • sc_catalog: Table with the Catalog of the Catalog Items.
  • sc_cat_item_user_criteria_mtom: Table to relate Available For user criteria and Catalog Items
  • sc_cat_item_user_criteria_no_mtom: Table to relate No Available For user criteria and Catalog Items
  • sys_attachment: Table to extract attachments.
  • sys_attachment_doc: Table to extract attachments.
  • user_criteria: Table of user criteria.

The roles needed to access these tables are: Catalog and User_Admin or Itil.

Identity Extraction

These are the tables required to extract the list of users that can access Knowledge Bases.

  • kb_knowledge_base
  • u_acl_table_users (custom table and depends on a custom web service)

The roles needed to access these tables are: Knowledge_Admin.



Limitations

Due to API limitations, the ServiceNow connector has the following limitations:


For Knowledge Articles 

The connector will crawl active and published articles. 

Depending on the chosen security, there could be additional filtering of articles:

  • Public articles: from the base of active and published articles, the connector allows only public items, which means articles with Public Knowledge Bases. Furthermore, the connector verifies if Can Read or Can Contribute fields are set, but only public user criteria are allowed. Finally, if Cannot Read is set, the item will be ignored.
  • User Criteria: This option does not filter. This type of security will add the Can Read, Cannot Read and Can Contribute user criteria values as ACLs. For these ACLs, a web service is required to extract the list of allowed users to read each user criteria.
  • Knowledge Base: This option does not filter. This type of security will add the sys_id of the Knowledge Base's article value as an ACL. For these ACLs, a web service is required to extract the list of allowed users to read each Knowledge Base.


For Catalog items:

The connector will crawl by default active items with role field empty (there is an option to remove this filter).

Depending on the chosen security, there could be additional filtering of items:

  • Public Catalog items: using the base of active items with empty roles (if checked), the connector will check if Available For field is set. The value should be the public User Criteria. In addition, if No Available For fields is set, the item will be ignored from the crawl.
  • User Criteria: This option does not filter. This type of security will add the Available For or No Available For user criteria values as ACLs. In case there is no UC, the ACL will be Public. For these ACLs, a web service is required to extract the list of allowed users to read each user criteria.


Due to technical constraints on the security model of ServiceNow, the security support for other content should be reviewed on a case by case basis.

Future Development Plans

The following features are not currently implemented, but are on the development plan:

  • Public content from other endpoints using a custom query.

Anything we should add? Please let us know.


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