Description
There are scenarios where users with the "vendor_contact" role have trouble accessing pages, search sources and widgets on the Vendor Management Service Portal if the 'Service Portal User Criteria Support' and 'Explicit Roles' plugins are enabled.
Symptoms can be the following but not limited to:
- Pages or Homepage returning 404 error message
- Widget(s) associated with the respective page(s) do not load
Release or Environment
London and newer.
Cause
The "vendor_contact" entitlement role contains "snc_external" role.
Technically, users with "vendor_contact" role are considered as external users.
As per our platform design and security in consideration, users with the "snc_external" role are by default restricted to access some components.
The Service Portal User Criteria Support [com.glide.service-portal.user-criteria] plugin provides the following component-level granularity where user criteria records are needed as per business requirements:
- Portal's page specific (Underlying widgets need to be configured similarly)
- Portal's widget specific (this will be then accessible on all pages that contain this widget)
- Portal's search source-specific (portal specific)
- Portal's widget-instance specific (this will be specific to portal's page and the respective widget, it won't work for any other page that uses the same widget)
Creating and mapping User Criteria that explicitly grants access to "snc_external" (or "vendor_contact") role will enable access the respective components.
Resolution
The resolution is to create the needed User Criteria records and map to the respective components (pages, widgets, widget instances and/or search source(s)).
If you do not want to use User Criteria after activating the Service Portal User Criteria Support plugin it is possible to control access via role-level instead:
- Navigate to "Service Portal" > "Properties".
- Look for the property "Enable use of User Criteria records instead of Roles fields for Service Portal entitlements" [glide.service_portal.user_criteria_enabled].
- Uncheck the checkbox "Yes | No".
- This system property defines permissions for Service Portal widgets, widget instances, search sources and pages
Additional Information
- User Criteria for Service Portal (Madrid): https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/madrid-servicenow-platform/page/build/service-portal/concept/user-criteria.html
- Explicit Roles (Madrid): https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/madrid-platform-administration/page/administer/contextual-security/concept/explicit-roles.html