Every once in a while, I run into an odd issue that isn’t documented. This time, it’s a lesson learned about Knowledge Articles…
The Problem
When looking at a list of Knowledge Articles, the State field was not showing up properly. In the following screenshot, you’ll see how most of the articles properly showed the current state of the Knowledge Article using boxes and checkmarks, but some of the articles were not rendering the state field properly.
The Solution
It turns out, that this field is actually called “workflow_state”, and is driven by the workflow of the record (partially). It’s okay if there’s no workflow against the record — it will still display properly. However, if you have two workflows running against the same record, the state field will not display properly.
In my case, I had one workflow handling publishing articles, and another workflow handling an outlier case for retiring unpublished articles. The solution was to eliminate one of the workflows, by either combining them, or handling one through scheduled jobs and business rules.
The Best Practice Conclusion
Only have one workflow executing against a single Knowledge, Request, and Requested Item record at a time.
Categories: Developers, Tips and Tricks
GarrettNow 
Leave a Reply