App Broker with Service Now Service Request for requesting Catalog Items

[PBolles]

New implementation App Broker with ServiceNow for a customer and they currently have their Software request setup in ServiceNow as Service Request items. They are doing the Workflow in the Service Request for questions and approvals tied to the Catalog Item. What or how will this affect the Catalog Item sync functions with App Broker? 

[jdempsey]

If they have "general" catalog items, nothing changes for those.  They would continue to create/manage those directly in ServiceNow (Note: no license check.  If this is required, then it gets a bit more complicated, since we only sync software catalog items).  For "software" catalog items, they would delete the existing items in ServiceNow and recreate them in App Broker.  Then the sync process will push them into ServiceNow from App Broker.  They can either use their existing ServiceNow workflow and add in our API calls for license checks/reservations/deployment, or they can use our default workflow and add in their approval process and any required procurement process.  Please note that our API's currently have no support for passing questions/answers between ServiceNow and App Broker, so it would be good to understand what questions they are asking during checkout and how that information is being used.

[PBolles]

Just to confirm, you can not create an already existing ServiceNow Catalog ITem in App Broker with the same name and sync. You have to delete the existing ServiceNow Catalog ITem then create the App Broker Catalog ITem and sync to create a new ServiceNow Catalog Item.

Is this correct?

[CharlesW]

App Broker will allow you to create a new catalog item with the same name. If you do, it will sync the new item into ServiceNow, even if there is an item of the same name already.  The productId in WD_WebPackages is what App Broker uses to track catalog items, not the name. Once the item is synced into ServiceNow, App Portal will receive a ServiceNow catalog id from ServiceNow, and it will write this entry into the WD_Package_SNCatalog table. It uses this table to determine when to sync a catalog item (for example after the catalog item is changed in App Broker), and to know when to update or add a new catalog item.. If a row already exists in WD_Package_SNCatalog] for a given packageID, then App Broker will know that it should update the existing item.. If the item does not exist already in this table, then it knows that a new item should be created. 

[jdempsey · Accepted solution]

In short, only catalog items you create in App Broker and sync into ServiceNow will be useful from an App Broker integration perspective.  The sync process will not touch existing catalog items in ServiceNow that App Broker didn't create, and those existing catalog items will not be able to leverage the integration with App Broker for license check/reservation/deployment.