SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2012

Posts Tagged ‘GlideAjax’

I‘ve seen a couple of requests recently for a capability to record actual, hand-drawn user signatures. There are probably several uses for this type of thing, but usually the requirement has something to do with a field service technician completing work in the field, and then being able to get a customer to sign indicating that some work was performed. This functionality doesn’t exist in ServiceNow, but it can be added thanks to a very cool jQuery plugin called ‘Signature Pad‘. I’ve incorporated this jQuery solution into a UI page/Dialog-based solution for use with regular ServiceNow records and forms. Read on for more information about the SNCGuru SignaturePad update set!

Signature Pad

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ServiceNow provides various methods for logging users into an instance. Local login, LDAP, SAML, and Digested Token are all used pretty regularly by customers. One thing that is often requested, but usually not successfully addressed, is the need to have the logged-in user accept some terms or conditions of use before they are allowed to use the system. The solutions attempted before usually suffered from a variety of issues ranging from overly-complex modification of one or more installation exits to being able to easily bypass the terms page entirely. In the end, these solutions seemed to be broken on some level. As we’ve seen requests for this type of functionality increase over the past few months, Jacob Andersen (who developed almost all of the integration and SSO information at SNCGuru) and I decided to collaborate to create a solution that actually works!

Login Terms Acceptance

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It’s not uncommon in any application to have scenarios where multiple people might be working with a single record at the same time. This is certainly true with Service-now (particularly for records on Task tables). You may have experienced frustration while working with an incident record, making updates, and having some of those updates overwritten a few minutes later because somebody else had the record open at the same time and didn’t know about the changes you had made. Because of situations like this, there is often a need to provide some sort of record lock or alert capability that lets people know when other people are working with the same record.

In the past, you may have used the ‘Simultaneous Update Alert’ script from the Service-now wiki to provide this capability. While that solution works fine, and I’ve used it on almost every engagement I’ve been involved with since it became available, it’s pretty limited in the information it provides back to the end user. You just get a simple alert on record submission…no details, no available actions other than to go ahead and submit or cancel, etc.

I recently had a coworker recommend the use of a UI page to provide a little more flexibility to the messaging that comes with the simultaneous update alert on the wiki. I thought this was a great idea and I had some time over the New Year’s holiday so I started working on it. I’ve finally come up with a solution that I’m happy with and have posted it here in the SNCGuru downloads section as the ‘Simultaneous Update Alert’ update set.

Simultaneous Update Alert

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H

appy New Year! Hopefully everybody had a great holiday. Mine was spent mostly helping my kids to break in some new toys :) . I did get some time to play with some new Service-now ideas as well. I’ll be sharing some very cool stuff here on SNCGuru over the next couple of weeks.
I’ve seen a couple requests recently for a way to allow users to select items from a slushbucket popup dialog. The most common reason for this is to help manage manual group approvals on a task record. If you’ve worked with group approvals at all, you’ve probably noticed that they work a little bit differently than regular approval records do. Group approval records are really just task records so you can’t just hit an ‘Edit’ button and add groups to be approvers on a task. Instead, you have to repeatedly click the ‘New’ button and create a new task record for each approval group. Normally this isn’t an issue because group approvals are typically managed in workflow but if you’re manually adding a lot of these, the process can be fairly tedious.
This article shows how you can provide a better UI by creating a slushbucket popup dialog that allows users to select one or many groups to add as approvers on a task. Even though the solution is designed for a specific use case, I’ve tried to make the example shown here generic enough so that you can easily modify it for other uses as well.

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