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Hi there,

Turning the Release Testing Preview (RTP) Release Notes for the Washington DC release inside out, there was a wow moment... "Let your catalog item requesters save drafts of catalog item forms so that requesters can edit the drafts later." Saving catalog items as draft, is such an often-heard question from customers!

Since the Product documentation on this subject is limited, let's dig into how "Save as Draft" works and documenting the undocumented.

Save as Draft

Viewing a random catalog item on an out-of-the-box Employee Center (and also Service Portal), you will very quickly notice the Save as Draft feature in the Order Item Section.

Save as Draft lets a user save the Catalog Item to edit it later if they don't want to discard the form. To edit a Catalog Item saved as a draft, a user can find drafts on the Request page.

Widgets, System Properties, and Table involved

As always with new Service Portal-related features, for a good chunk of customers new features will not be visible and/or won't break. The most obvious reason would be using cloned/edited Widgets.

What artifacts are involved with Save as Draft? Viewing a Catalog Item on Employee Center the "HRM Catalog Item" Service Portal Widget is used. This Widget actually gets Widget "SC Catalog Item" [id=widget-sc-cat-item-v2], which is the same Widget used on the Service Portal.

The updated Widget first checks on if on a Catalog Item Save as Draft is enabled. For this a new field on the "sc_cat_item" table has been added, "Hide 'Save' as Draft" [no_save_as_draft]. If this field is not visible on your ServiceNow instance, this might be due to form lay-out changes in the past and this should be listed within the Skipped Updates of the Washington DC upgrade.

Within the Widget Server Script also two System Properties are checked:

- System Property "glide.sc.disable.save_as_draft" should not be "true". Out-of-the-box this System Property does not exist, so should evaluate to false.

- System Property "glide.sc.enable.save_as_draft.portal." followed by the URL suffix of the Service Portal the user is on.

If you are working on a different Service Portal, a custom Service Portal, or a Service Portal with a changed URL suffix: you can add the System Property in the format described above.

So where are the draft catalog items stored? I did see a ServiceNow Community question where one of the answers was that this is not stored_(...). Of course that's not true . Digging into the SC Catalog Item widget, functions from Script Include _"SPCart" are called. Another part of the puzzle that got updated with the Washington DC release. Within the SPCart Script Include, several functions are performing GlideRecord queries against the Items table [sc_cart_item].

Draft catalog item

Lastly here is an example of a catalog item saved as a draft within the Items table.

And that's it, documenting the undocumented and providing a bit more technical details of what is involved with the new Save as Draft feature introduced with the Washington DC release.

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That's it. Hope you like it. If any questions or remarks, let me know!

Kind regards,

Mark Roethof

Independent ServiceNow Consultant

9x ServiceNow MVP

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