Templates for Knowledge Base Articles

Justin_Clarke

Looking at knowledge base, would be great to have the ability to have templates you can select and use when creating an article.
This way i can have a template pre populating a format for End User and also Analsyt Content to keep it uniform.

Just like an SR when you create via the draw it gives the option to select from template.

Chris_Jordan

This is an excellent idea, but you know what developers think about documentation.

Michael_Baldry

This would be awesome to have. We've struggled with a good way to get stuff into the KB in a consistent (and user-friendly) way. The HTML/formatting generated by converting from Word & OneNote isn't great, so it would be really nice to be able to define templates inside the portal.

For now, I liked the really basic template that @Candice_Yeudall posted in this thread: https://community.cireson.com/discussion/298/how-do-you-structure-layout-your-knowledgebase-articles#latest. I took that template and plugged it into a little function that we put in our custom.js file, which sets the "AnalystContent" and "EndUserContent" properties (as well as their ContentType properties), so that all new KB articles start off with the basic structure defined. Here's the script:

// Run this script whenever the HTML document is loaded and ready

$(document).ready(function() {

    // Find the current page's URL

    var href = window.location.href;

    // If the URL is equal to the "New KB Article" URL, run this script. Need to check for both

    // staging & production, so both URLs are included here.

    if (href === "https://<production>/KnowledgeBase/New" || href === "http://<staging>/KnowledgeBase/New")  {
        //replace this HTML with whatever you want to use as your template. I set the same template for both the end user content & the analyst content, but you could use different ones for each

        var templateHTML = "<span style=\"font-family:\'Tahoma\',\'sans-serif\';font-size:12pt;\"><h1 style=\"font-weight:bold;margin-bottom:0px;\">Version History</h1>Article Release: 1.0 | Release Date: January 23, 2014<h1 style=\"font-weight:bold;margin-bottom:0px;\">Overview</h1><h1 style=\"font-weight:bold;margin-bottom:0px;\">Who Article Applies To</h1><h1 style=\"font-weight:bold;margin-bottom:0px;\">Prerequisites</h1><h1 style=\"font-weight:bold;margin-bottom:0px;\">Main Article</h1><h2 style=\"font-weight:bold;margin-bottom:0px;\">Sub-Section</h2><h3 style=\"font-weight:bold;margin-bottom:0px;\">Sub-Sub-Section</h3><h1 style=\"font-weight:bold;margin-bottom:0px;\">Tips</h1></span>";

        // Set the Analyst/EndUser Content & ContentType attributes to use the template HTML you defined above

        pageForm.viewModel.AnalystContent = templateHTML;

        pageForm.viewModel.AnalystContentType = "html";

        pageForm.viewModel.EndUserContent = templateHTML;

        pageForm.viewModel.EndUserContentType = "html";

    }

});

Justin_Clarke

Thanks for the Script Michael, I have tested this in our Dev system and looks great.

Justin_Clarke

The above code is great but would it be possilble to do the above based on article type? IE: if i select "how to"it gives a different starting html headings etc but if i select "FAQ" it would give me another one?

this would just be for the new article page.

Konstantin_Slavin-Bo

@Justin_Clarke
I guess it should be possible, but unfortunately I'm having trouble with getting it to work.

First of all, it doesn't seem like you can actually change AnalystContent, after the page has loaded completely. If it's set before the page has finished loading; it works. But if you try to set it after, it doesn't update the actual text. I'm not sure why this is. But I guess this could be circumvented by replacing .html() on the body element of the iframe.

Even so, my main problem is that I can't figure out how to bind to the change event of the KAType dropdown. Does anybody have an idea of how to get the correct object?