On January 1, 2020 a lot of people will wake up with a headache. While some will be due to the previous night's activities, others will be due to a disappearing Knowledge Base, and a lack of systematic delegation.
What is KB-pocalypse?
ServiceNow's default date value has always been set to 2020-01-01. While this was a good 'future' date to use, the future is now here! This means that some records won't be viewed as valid once the new year begins.
Some examples are:
- Delegates: Delegate records have a default 'ends' date of 2020-01-01. All delegations with this end date will no longer be active.
- Knowledge Base: If your knowledge articles have a Valid to (valid_to) date of 2020-01-01, then they won't be visible to anybody searching for them through the Service Portal, or searching/browsing the Knowledge homepage.
How can I see if this impacts me?
Running the script below will show you what tables still have this default value, and how many records still have a date of 2020-01-01.
/*This script will find all dictionary entries that are using 2020-01-01 as a default date, and tell you the number of impacted records. To actually make changes, you will want to change the update flag to true;*///change this flag to true if you want to update the dictionary entries and affected recordsvar update = false; //Update this value as yyyy-mm-ddvar newDefaultDate = "2030-01-01"; var gd = new GlideDate(); gd.setValue(newDefaultDate); gd.getDisplayValue();var gdt = new GlideDate(); gdt.setValue(newDefaultDate+' 23:59:59'); gdt.getDisplayValue();if(!update){ gs.print("Since the update flag is false, we are not making upates to these records.");}var dictionaryEntry = new GlideRecord("sys_dictionary");dictionaryEntry.addEncodedQuery("default_valueLIKE2020-01-01^active=true^internal_type=glide_date^ORinternal_type=glide_date_time");dictionaryEntry.query();while(dictionaryEntry.next()){ var table = new GlideRecord(dictionaryEntry.name.toString()); table.addEncodedQuery(dictionaryEntry.element.toString()+"ON2020-01-01@javascript:gs.dateGenerate('2020-01-01','start')@javascript:gs.dateGenerate('2020-01-01','end')"); table.query(); if(table.hasNext()){ gs.print("There are "+table.getRowCount()+ " "+dictionaryEntry.name.toString()+" records with a "+dictionaryEntry.element.toString()+" date of 2020-01-01"); if(update){ var newDate = dictionaryEntry.internal_type == "glide_date" ? gd.getDisplayValue() : gdt.getDisplayValue(); while(table.next()){ table.setValue(dictionaryEntry.element.toString(), newDate); table.update(); } } } else{ gs.print("The "+dictionaryEntry.name.toString()+" table still has this default value, but doesn't have any records."); } if(update){ dictionaryEntry.default_value = dictionaryEntry.default_value.replace(/2020-01-01/gi, newDefaultDate); dictionaryEntry.update(); }}
Also available on GitHub.
How can I fix it?
You can fix this by completing the following:
- Change all the affected records as identified above
- Updating the dictionary entry so that future records won't still default to 2020-01-01.
Please note that the above script will do this for you if you change the update flag to true.
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