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Posts Tagged ‘Reference field’

Adding Referenced Records Without Leaving the Form

Thursday, 24 March, 2011 05:13 Written by Mark Stanger
13 Comments

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ne problem I’ve seen a few times is the need to create a new record on the fly in order to populate it into a reference field. This problem recently came up for me with a client I’m working with so I decided to come up with a good solution. An example scenario would be a technician filling out an incident record for a user that doesn’t yet exist in the system. At first glance, the solution seems simple enough…simply navigate to the user form and create the new user, then create your incident record. While that can be done, it’s not always so simple. What if the technician has just spent several minutes filling out the incident and then realizes the caller doesn’t exist? The user would then have to navigate away from that incident record and lose all of the changes, or open an entirely new browser window to create the user and then return and populate the field.

Fortunately, there is a better way if you know how to leverage UI Macros and GlideDialogWindow QuickForms. This article shows a solution that you can use for any ‘sys_user’ reference field in your system. It can also be easily modified and applied to other reference fields as well.

GlideDialogWindow-Add User

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Fixing the Fatal Flaw of Before Query Business Rules

Wednesday, 05 January, 2011 09:30 Written by Mark Stanger
13 Comments

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‘ve written before on SNCGuru about how ‘before query’ business rules can (and should) be used to secure row-level read access to records in Service-now. While this usually works perfectly, there is one issue that I’ve seen come up continually that there hasn’t been a good fix for. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen several incidents and questions about inactive users disappearing from reference fields in Service-now systems. You may have noticed this yourself when you’ve de-activated users or groups in your system. The culprit in these cases is the ‘user query’ or ‘group query’ business rule.

The recommended (but really not great) solution up until this point is to turn the business rule off and use a reference qualifier on the reference field that you need to see the user in. The reason this solution is a bad one is that there are over 300 user reference and list fields in your system! Not only is that a big pain (and a bad idea) to add that reference qualifier to all of those places, but it also does nothing for the countless places (modules, filters, reports, etc.) that have UI elements that work like reference fields but cannot be filtered with a reference qualifier! This isn’t a new problem, but I’ve come up with a new (and extremely simple) solution.

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Creating an Alias for Reference Field Searches

Monday, 03 May, 2010 07:26 Written by Mark Stanger
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A while ago I wrote about some of the different ways to customize the autocomplete search behavior for a reference field. I saw a forum post the other day where the poster asked if it was possible to create aliases for records so that they could be searched on. For example, what if you had a CI called ‘ABC’ but everybody knew it by the name of ‘XYZ’? While support for this type of searching isn’t really built into Service-now, it is possible to add this kind of behavior to a reference field. If the CI just had a single alias, you could probably just customize the display value and do a ‘contains’ autocomplete search as described in the article previously. For this specific scenario I think that there might be a better way to accomplish the same thing.

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Multiple Reference Display Values Per Table

Tuesday, 06 April, 2010 07:11 Written by Mark Stanger
6 Comments

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hen working with reference fields, it is really important to understand how the display value for the reference field works.  The display value for a reference field is what the end user actually sees when they search in a reference field to produce an autocomplete dropdown and what they can see when a reference field gets populated.  Information about reference fields and reference field display values can be found here.

Some questions about display values that I hear very often are “How do I show information from more than one field for the display value?” or “Can I have different display values on 2 reference fields that reference the same table?”.  The limiting factor when answering these questions is that you’re limited to a single searchable display value per referenced table. What this means is that EVERY reference field that references a particular table needs to use that table’s display value so you cannot mix and match between reference fields.  There are a couple of options that can be used to provide a bit more information to the user in these scenarios however.

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Latest Comments

  • Mark Stanger: This functionality doesn’t connect to an FTP server. See this line in the post above…...
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