Creating and publishing specification versions

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated April 14, 2026
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    Summary of Creating and publishing specification versions

    As a product catalog manager in ServiceNow, you manage evolving product, service, and resource catalog items by creating and publishing new specification versions. These versions capture engineering improvements and changes—such as updated characteristics, options, and relationships—that make your offerings more competitive and relevant. By maintaining current specification versions, your sales agents work with the latest product data to sell upgraded or complementary offerings effectively.

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    Creating Specification Versions

    When creating a specification version, you assign version numbers to affected product, service, or resource specifications and update related data to reflect engineering changes. This includes:

    • Characteristics and characteristic options
    • Specification relationships
    • Decomposition rules
    • Quantity mappings
    • Attribute propagation rules

    You then create and publish product offering versions based on these updated specifications and retire or archive outdated specifications and offerings as needed.

    Data Copy and Validation on Version Creation

    When a new specification version is created from a published specification, the system copies core fields (e.g., category, type, dates, description, product code) and populates version-specific fields such as the incremental version number and display name. Associated characteristics, characteristic options, specification relationships, decomposition rules, quantity mappings, and attribute propagation rules are also copied and updated to reference the current specification versions.

    Upon publishing the new version, ServiceNow AI Platform® validates that all rules and references are consistent with the updated characteristics and options. Validation errors occur if referenced elements have been removed or altered improperly, blocking publishing until resolved.

    Common Validation Errors and Resolutions

    If errors arise during publishing, typical issues involve invalid specification versions or invalid characteristics/options within:

    • Specification relationships
    • Decomposition rules
    • Quantity mapping rules
    • Attribute propagation rules
    • Attribute mappings

    Resolution steps generally require updating the source specification versions to the current ones or correcting/removing invalid characteristics or options in the respective rule forms.

    As a product catalog manager, you can create and publish the specification versions that list the improved products and services that you can offer to your customers in a technical product catalog.

    Your product catalogs define the products, services, and resources available to your customers so they can decide what to purchase from you. Your catalog items will continue to evolve over time to accommodate the changes that are related to how your items are sold, configured, and delivered to your customers. Typically, these changes are related to engineering improvements that make the products, services, and resources more marketable and appealing to your customers. The changes usually are to the fit, form and function, characteristics, and characteristic options, and specification relationships of your catalog items. For example, a home internet product may evolve over multiple revisions to support changes that are related to pricing and increased internet speeds.

    By creating new specification and product offering versions for your products, you enable your agents to work with the latest versions of your product and service offerings when they sell more expensive, complementary, upgraded, or related products to your customers.

    Creating specification versions for use in product offerings

    As a product catalog manager, you do the following actions when you create a version of a specification for use in a product offering:

    1. Create and assign a version number in each of the product, service, or resource specifications or product offering records that are affected by the changes.
    2. Create the required specification relationships, decomposition rules, and attribute mappings for each specification in the new version. As a product catalog manager, you update the following information to reflect the engineering changes that were made to the associated specifications:
      • Characteristics
      • Characteristic options
      • Specification relationships
      • Decomposition rules
      • Quantity mappings
      • Attribute propagation rules
      Note:
      To learn more, see Create and publish a specification version.
    3. Create a product offering, and then publish it when you update your product catalog. To learn more, see Create and publish a product offering version.
    4. Retire or archive old or unused specifications, and product offerings. To learn more, see Retiring or archiving versioned specifications and product offerings.

    Updates and validations that are performed when you create and publish a specification version

    When you create a version for a currently published specification, the system copies the following data into, or populates, the new specification record as follows:

    1. Copies the following fields with these basic specification details:
      • Category
      • Type
      • Start and End date
      • Description
      • External ID
      • Product code and Product line
      • Cost to Company
      • Composite
      • Installation Required
      • Location-specific
    2. Blanks out the External Version field.
      Note:
      The External ID and External Version fields don't appear on the specification forms by default but can be added by changing the form layouts.
    3. Populates the following fields with the detailed information that you enter for the new specification version:
      • Version. The next incremental number appears.
      • Display Name. The display name is the system-assigned concatenation of the specification name and its current version number. You can overwrite this field.
      • Initial Version. The name of the base version of the specification appears but can't be changed.
      • Previous Version. The name of the specification is as it was in the previous version.
    4. Copies the associated characteristic and characteristic options. To learn more, see Create the characteristics and characteristic options for your product offerings.
    5. Copies the associated specification relationships, attribute mapping, decomposition rules, and quantity mappings when you use extension point scripts. When copied, the source specifications in the associated specification relationship and decomposition rule records are automatically updated to the current versions of the source specifications.
      Note:
      To learn more about these rules, see Create specification relationships, quantity mapping, and decomposition rules for Order Management.
    6. Copies the associated quantity mappings and attribute propagation rules. The source specifications in the quantity mappings and attribute propagation rules are also updated to the current versions. To learn more about these rules, see .

    When you publish the updated specification version, the ServiceNow AI Platform® performs validations on your edits. These validations ensure that all rules are valid with the characteristic and characteristic options that are available for the new specification version. An error might occur if you inadvertently remove or change the characteristics or characteristic options that are referenced by the other rules that are associated with the new specification version. If an error occurs, a message similar to this example appears.

    Copied rules validation errors

    You can publish a new specification version only after you resolve all errors. This table contains some possible validation errors that you may see and the actions you can take to resolve the issue.
    Table 1. Copied rules validation errors and resolution actions
    Error Resolution actions
    Invalid specification version in the specification relationship. Update the source specification version to the current version:
    1. Select Specification Characteristics.
    2. Update the Source Specification field in the Specification Relationships form.
    Invalid specification versions in the decomposition rule. Update the source specification version to the current version:
    1. Select Specification Relationships.
    2. Update the Source Specification field in the Specification Relationships form.
    Invalid characteristic in the decomposition rule. Update or remove the invalid characteristic in the Decomposition Rules form:
    1. Select Specification Characteristics.
    2. Update or remove any invalid characteristics.
    Invalid characteristic options in the decomposition rule. Update or remove the invalid characteristic options in the Decomposition Rules form:
    1. Select Specification Characteristics.
    2. Update or remove any invalid characteristic options.
    Invalid characteristic options in the quantity rule. Update or remove the invalid characteristic options in the Attribute Mappings form:
    1. Select Attribute Mappings.
    2. Update or remove any invalid characteristic options.
    Invalid specification version in the attribute propagation rule. Update the Source Specification field in the Attribute Propagation form to the current version.
    Invalid characteristic in the attribute mapping rule. Update or remove the invalid characteristics in the Attribute Mappings form:
    1. Select Attribute Mappings.
    2. Update or remove any invalid characteristics.