& character issue in ServiceNow Service Desk Integration

IdentityIQ (IIQ) IIQ Discussion and Questions
1

We are currently using the ServiceNow Service Desk Integration to open up REQ’s within ServiceNow for many of our workflows. We ran into an issue whenever there is a string value that has the “&” character and trying to pass that to ServiceNow within the requested item description of the RITM. An example, we need to include department: “Information & Technology” into the requested item description of the RITM. The value that gets set shows Information & Technology

I have confirmed that in the account request of the provisioning plan, it shows the correct value of “Information & Technology”, but when it executes the plan to create the ticket in ServiceNow, it shows Information & Technology.

Wondering if anyone else has encountered this issue before.

2

So unfortunately I don’t have a solution for you directly (I don’t have access to an ITSM integration), but I can hopefully give you some info to help you further troubleshoot and work to correct this issue.

First and foremost - the cause: The SNOW integration (and I believe all ITSM integrations) use SOAP APIs, which is XML-formatted. The & you’re getting is a result of your template (or variable initialization script) “XML-escaping” the & character.
The next helpful tidbit is that IIQ processes the SOAP template to populate the template using the same Velocity engine/framework that is used for customizing IIQ email templates.

What you need to attempt to do is format the SOAP request in such a way that the SOAP request is valid XML with the &, and for SNOW to accept that request and present it as such.

You will probably need to do some tweaking in either your SOAP request template, or in your Integration rule (or both) to achieve the desired result. I believe these loggers will actually log the full raw HTTP request and response (i.e. exactly what IIQ sends to SNOW, and exactly what SNOW sends back to IIQ), which should hopefully help as well:

logger.orgapachehttp.name=org.apache.http
logger.orgapachehttp.level=trace

logger.httpwire.name=org.apache.http.wire
logger.httpwire.level=trace

logger.httpclientwire.name=httpclient.wire
logger.httpclientwire.level=trace
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