One of the things that I learned during the process of rolling out that translation project is that when you add a variable to a catalog item, ServiceNow doesn’t go back through and retroactively add the new variable to existing RITMS.
In hindsight, that makes a lot of sense. The new variable might be mandatory on new RITMS, so if you were to add it to old RITMS, you’d have to either gather that new information for all old RITMS relating to that catalog item (likely time intensive, and potentially impossible), or you’d risk some of the core logic falling over when it came across mandatory variables an a RITM that hadn’t ever been filled out.
Unfortunately, not operating with the benefit of hindsight, I initially had thought that the lack of a link on old RITMS to the variables I’d created meant that the new RITMS would likewise not have a link between the RITM and the variable until I populated the variable.
Since that wasn’t the case, I ended up having to re-tool a couple of aspects of the translation logic as it related to translating variables.
Now I know better.