Linking to most recent ServiceNow Docs pages or ServiceNow Developer site pages

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Hi there,

Writing some documentation, for customers, for internal purposes, etcetera, and applying links to the ServiceNow Product Documentation (Docs) or ServiceNow Developer site. Those pages (almost) all contain the release name. Is there a way to always have the most recent documentation, instead of the documentation of the previous release? Or if you don't maintain the URLs, after a few releases, the URLs will even not work anymore!

Recognizable? There is a solution!

Note: The solution I'll be sharing is not rock solid (for example when ServiceNow renames or removes pages), though would solve the majority of situations to keep the URLs used up-to-date.

Docs

Take for example the Flow Designer overview page on the Docs. The URL would be:
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/newyork-servicenow-platform/page/administer/flow-designer/concept...

Note the release name used, "newyork". Still works at this moment, though these pages only are available for a certain amount of releases. Also the page might have been updated for the newer releases.

Latest

To always get the page for the latest release… here's the redirect URL that you can use:
https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=page_name.html&version=latest

Simply replace the "page_name". So in this example used earlier, the page name would be "flow-designer-arch-overview". URL would then be:
https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=flow-designer-arch-overview.html&version=latest

You can also use anchors that are available on the page. Just add the anchor as you usually would do with HTML, so for example adding #d2031478e69. On the Flow Designer overview page, that's the anchor for "Flow processing".
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/rome-servicenow-platform/page/administer/flow-designer/concept/fl...

Developer

Take for example the Technical Best Practices on the Developer site. The URL would be:
https://developer.servicenow.com/dev.do#!/guides/orlando/now-platform/tpb-guide/scripting_technical_...

Note the release name used, "orlando". Still works fine at this moment, though also here: the page might have been updated for the newer releases.

Latest

To always get the latest release… simply replace the release name with "latest". So in the example used earlier, the URL would then be:
https://developer.servicenow.com/dev.do#!/guides/latest/now-platform/tpb-guide/scripting_technical_b...

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And that's it! Hopefully this will help you keeping URLs used up-to-date.

If any questions or remarks, let me know.

Kind regards,

Mark Roethof

ServiceNow Technical Consultant @ Quint Technology
1x ServiceNow Developer MVP

1x ServiceNow Community MVP

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