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How to display a lot of Catalog Items in ServiceNow

A customer implementing App Broker is looking to import around 700 Catalog Items into the tool, and is using it with ServiceNow as the front end. It looks as though the only way to display catalog items in ServiceNow that are mapped to their counterpart in App Broker, is to use tiles  for individual apps and there isn't much in terms of options to organize them and break them out into groups. Is this accurate or is there a recommended way to organize a large number of catalog items without negatively impacting end user ux too much?

(1) Solution

How the catalog items display is up to the customer and their ServiceNow team.  ServiceNow provides a couple different views of the catalog data, and the service portal is completely customizable, so they can make it display catalog items however they want.  As for organization, they can certainly create categories/subcategories and map those appropriately, just like they can do in App Broker.  In fact, the default catalog sync configuration passes a hard-coded value of "Software" for the category name, but there is also a field called ap_category that passes whatever category is assigned in App Broker.  You can either change the catalog sync configuration to pass the App Broker category variable in the Category field, or you can change the transform map on the ServiceNow side to map the ap_category field instead of mapping the category field.  One thing to be aware of is that depending on the permissions granted to the integration account, the sync process may or may not create categories that don't already exist.  If creating new categories automatically during the sync, this removes your ability to control where those categories end up in the hierarchy (the new categories will all end up in the "root" of the catalog, which may not be desirable).  It also means that if you have a typo in the category name in App Broker, that same typo will come across in ServiceNow.  The alternative is to pre-create your desired category structure in ServiceNow and then when App Broker syncs the catalog, they will just end up in the right place (assuming the category names in App Broker match the ones created in ServiceNow).

Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera. If my reply answers a question you have raised, please click "ACCEPT AS SOLUTION".

View solution in original post

(4) Replies

How the catalog items display is up to the customer and their ServiceNow team.  ServiceNow provides a couple different views of the catalog data, and the service portal is completely customizable, so they can make it display catalog items however they want.  As for organization, they can certainly create categories/subcategories and map those appropriately, just like they can do in App Broker.  In fact, the default catalog sync configuration passes a hard-coded value of "Software" for the category name, but there is also a field called ap_category that passes whatever category is assigned in App Broker.  You can either change the catalog sync configuration to pass the App Broker category variable in the Category field, or you can change the transform map on the ServiceNow side to map the ap_category field instead of mapping the category field.  One thing to be aware of is that depending on the permissions granted to the integration account, the sync process may or may not create categories that don't already exist.  If creating new categories automatically during the sync, this removes your ability to control where those categories end up in the hierarchy (the new categories will all end up in the "root" of the catalog, which may not be desirable).  It also means that if you have a typo in the category name in App Broker, that same typo will come across in ServiceNow.  The alternative is to pre-create your desired category structure in ServiceNow and then when App Broker syncs the catalog, they will just end up in the right place (assuming the category names in App Broker match the ones created in ServiceNow).

Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera. If my reply answers a question you have raised, please click "ACCEPT AS SOLUTION".

Thanks Jim. Any chance you know an ETA of when Paris will be officially supported?

As mentioned, I'm hoping that "official" support gets included in the 2021 R1 release.. I've asked the Product Manager for App Broker to confirm.. I'll update this thread once I get a response.

Well, I spoke with Product Management... I can't say as I got a firm commitment to support Paris, but they did state that they will test against Paris.. If no significant issues are found, then they will certify.. If major issues are found, which require a significant dev effort, then Paris support will not be included in the next release..