How to redirect a knowledge article always to the latest version? - Support and Troubleshooting

How to redirect a knowledge article always to the latest version? Issue

Description Consider a knowledge article is being added to the related list of another record. After adding the knowledge article, there are some updates made to it so now the article has a new version with the updated information.

But in the related list, the knowledge article will be still pointing to the older version.

How to redirect those older versions to the newer version?

Procedure As mentioned by the product owner in this community article, https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=e1fb7986db655b44fc5b7a9e0f96191e

'The current behavior is expected by design because there are requirements from other customers to preserve the link to the original article version (this is, in fact, a KCS - Knowledge Centered Support - requirement).'

If a new article is published, then the older version will be having an info message that is displayed at the top of the article that would point to the newer version.

As mentioned in the community article above, the Enhancement request has been created to our product team asking them to consider enabling the redirect behavior in the future releases.

However, there are some ways to achieve the desired behavior.

1. Customize the article view (kb_view) page to issue a redirect to the latest version, if available. This can be checked by querying the kb_knowledge table with the article number, and check the version field of the records returned to find out the latest version.

However, if the link is pointing to the 'kb_knowledge' form instead of the article view page, then set up redirection to the latest version with the help of Processors (Please refer to this community article, answered by 'LucasVieites' https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=b48ff2e9db58dbc01dcaf3231f961918)

2. Solve this at the source, i.e. when a new version of an article is created/published, have a custom business rule to find out if this article is linked to in any custom application. If yes, then go ahead and update the references to the newly created article version record.

Applicable Versions Madrid and below