We recently had an issue where random users were being met with the following error message when attempting to submit record producers and catalogue items via the service portal:

"Something went wrong and your request could not be submitted. Please contact your system administrator"

The record producer / catalogue item appeared to be added to the cart, but no record was actually submitted. The browser console log was also showing a 500 server error and indicated the error was occurring in the order_now API.

After discussions with ServiceNow Support, they identified the cause to be an inactive function field that had been added to the sc_item_option table. The database was attempting to parse the string field as a DOUBLE integer due to the function. As the field was being populated with a sys_id, it would process the integer up until it hit the first non-numeric character in the sys_id. If the first non-numeric character in the sys_id was an 'e', the value was treated as scientific notation and the database attempted to add an extremely large number into the field. This overflowed the limit of the DOUBLE type and resulted in the error.

To resolve this issue, I had to delete the function field on the sc_item_option table (it was a custom field but wasn't being used anyway). The important thing to note is that this field was inactive, but was still the root cause of the issue.

Below is the KB that ServiceNow have in relation to this type of issue. See example 5 in particular.

https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb\_article\_view&sysparm\_article=KB0964198

Hope this helps anyone else that comes across this error message.

Cheers,

Brad