Skip previous message history in Virtual Agent web client

Mark Roethof · ‎05-22-2022

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Hi there,

When working with the Virtual Agent web client, there are several parameters that you can add to Service Portal Agent Chat Configuration and a (legacy) Service Portal widget. Parameters like loading a specific topic, disabling sound notifications, activating live agent only, etcetera. In a few short articles, I'll share a bit of background information on some of these parameters. This time: Skip the previous message history from being loaded for new conversations in the Virtual Agent web client.

Skip previous message history

By default when a new conversation is started, the previous message history (up to a month) will be loaded. It is possible to disable this behavior and start a new conversation without the previous message history. Depending on how you implemented the Virtual Agent web client on your instance, you would need to add a parameter to the applicable Service Portal Agent Chat Configuration record, or add it to the URL parameters of the (legacy) Service Portal widget. Both methods do work slightly differently.

Service Portal Agent Chat Configuration

If you are using Service Portal Agent Chat Configuration, open the applicable Service Portal Agent Chat Configuration record. Within the Server Script you would need to add "skip_load_history: true" to skip the previous message history being loaded.

For example:

(function($sp) {

    return = {
        skip_load_history: true
    };

})($sp);

(legacy) Service Portal widget

If you are using a (legacy) Service Portal widget, verify if it concerns an embedded widget (for example to the header or footer of the portal) or that it concerns a widget instance that has been added to a specific page.

Widget instance

When having a Widget instance in place, ctrl + right-click on the Virtual Agent icon, and select "Instance Options".

Within the modal, add to the "Virtual Agent Client URL Parameters" field:

sysparm_skip_load_history=true

Embedded widget

A commonly seen method when working with the Virtual Agent web client, is embedding the Service Portal widget to the header or footer of the portal. Adding URL parameters is also possible in this case, I've explained such in a previous article (Adding instance options to directly embedded Service Portal Widgets).

For example, your code for embedding the Service Portal widget might look like this:

<widget id="sn-va-sp-widget"></widget>

To skip the previous message history from loaden you would need to expand this to:

<widget id="sn-va-sp-widget" options='{"va_url_params":"&sysparm_skip_load_history=true"}'></widget>

Result

Before

After

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And that's it! A short explanation on how you can skip the previous message history from being loaded for new conversations in the Virtual Agent web client, for both Service Portal Agent Chat Configuration and a Service Portal widget. If any questions, let me know!

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Kind regards,

Mark Roethof

ServiceNow Technical Platform Architect @ Eraneous
3x ServiceNow Developer MVP

3x ServiceNow Community MVP

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Anubha Datey · ‎09-11-2022

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the super helpful article.

I just have one issue, currently we have virtual agents for separate IT & HR portals, so we want to achieve this case --> IT virtual agent chat history should contain only IT related conversation and not HR. So what should we do?

Thanks in advance.

Anu

Manal Aquil1 · ‎10-10-2022

Interesting to know, thanks for sharing.

Ethan19 · ‎12-05-2023

(function($sp) {

    return = {
        skip_load_history: true
    };

})($sp);

For code above had to remove the equal sign for it to work - else it gave a syntax error

(function($sp) {

    return  {
        skip_load_history: true
    };

})($sp);

so this instead worked for me

praveen_rajan · ‎11-15-2024

Respected @Mark Roethof , thank you for sharing. Could you please guide me on how to modify the script so that script only functions when the logged-in user is impersonating any another user. Thanks in advanced.