Symptoms

• When changing to any language but English, the Recent & Popular Items widget can throw NullPointerException errors.
• This widget in OOB exists in "sc_landing" page and can be navigated as "sp?id=sc_landing".

Release

Kingston and London.

Environment

Service Portal

Cause

• Basically, the widget loops through certain items based on popularity or most recently used.
• One of the causes can be the list of these catalog items can contain bad mapping with the respective catalogs/categories. (may or may not exist)
• Another one can be that the short description and/or name of the items can have some bad characters which can't be translated.

Resolution

• Review the items carefully when the instance is in English language version.
• And modify the affected records.