TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2012

Posts Tagged ‘Service catalog’

Exporting Service Catalog Items in One Step

Thursday, 26 January, 2012 10:54 Written by Mark Stanger
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his post comes in response to a request I received from some of my colleagues at ServiceNow to be able to export a catalog item definition to XML and transport it between instances. I’ve written before about how you can quckly export and import data between ServiceNow instances using the XML export/import context menus. While this works great for a lot of situations, it doesn’t work so great for data that resides in multiple tables, but really makes sense to be exported as a single unit. The components that make up a Catalog item definition are actually stored in over 21 separate tables! It is possible to export a catalog item but you have to do at least 21 separate exports to do it. In this post, I’ll show you how you can set up a UI action to export information from all 21+ tables that make up a catalog item definition…in one click!

Export Catalog Item

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Control the Execution Order of Request Items in an Order Guide

Tuesday, 23 August, 2011 06:43 Written by Mark Stanger
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ately I’ve been doing some service catalog work for a couple of clients and I’ve come across a requirement that I really haven’t had to address before. The requirement deals with order guides…specifically with the ability to control the execution order of individual items within an order guide. You’re probably aware that ServiceNow provides complete control over the ordering of tasks within a catalog item, but what do you do with an order guide that needs to have one item complete before the next 2 items can start? There’s not a simple way to control this behavior by default so I came up with a way and I’ll share it here.

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Hide Empty Variables on a Standard Form

Thursday, 16 June, 2011 10:31 Written by Mark Stanger
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ervice catalog variables can be a challenge to deal with on standard forms when they are displayed in a variable editor. I’ve written before about different ways that you can solve one of these challenges…making the variables read only, so that they can’t be modified after the initial submission through the service catalog interface. Another common problem I’ve seen is that you can end up with a lot of variables that end up empty in the variable editor on your request item or task because they were optional or hidden on the front-end catalog form. If the variables are empty and you aren’t going to have users interact with them on the standard forms then there isn’t much use in having these variables show up at all in the variable editor.

Until now there really hasn’t been a good way to deal with this issue because of the challenges of dealing with so many different variable types in client-side JavaScript. A couple of days ago one of my colleagues, Jacob Kimball, suggested to me that we might be able to overcome this issue by using a ‘display’ business rule to collect the blank variable information at the server and then pass those variable names to the client. So, you can thank Jacob Kimball for the brilliance of this solution. I’m just spreading the love. :)

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Populate Order Guide on Request Ticket

Thursday, 24 February, 2011 08:25 Written by Mark Stanger
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rder guides are a service catalog concept that allow you to set up an initial form to ask the user certain questions in order to determine a collection of catalog items they need to order. The classic use case for an order guide is the ‘New Employee Hire’ item that Service-now provides in the out-of-box demo data. While order guides are really a front-end routing concept, it can sometimes be useful to report on requests that were generated for a particular order guide. This functionality doesn’t exist out-of-box in Service-now, but it is very easy to add. Here’s a good tip that I recently learned from Sean Grison and Valor Poland about how to populate the order guide used to generate a particular request.

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Make Checkbox Variables Mandatory

Tuesday, 25 January, 2011 06:54 Written by Mark Stanger
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andatory fields are usually pretty simple to work with. Service-now provides simple UI policy and client script methods to make fields and variables mandatory. You may have noticed as you have worked with checkbox variables in the service catalog that these methods don’t apply. The reason for this makes perfect sense if you think about it. A checkbox has only two possible values…true or false. When the checkbox variable loads it is already set with a value of false (unchecked). Because of this, there’s never a situation where a checkbox variable wouldn’t satisfy a mandatory check. It will ALWAYS have a value!
What people usually want in these scenarios is to require a user to select a minimum number of options from a certain group of checkbox variables. In these scenarios, this minimum number of items checked really represents the standard for a mandatory check for that group of checkboxes. There’s not a simple way to handle these situations, but I’ve set up some client script solutions that allow you to perform this type of validation if it is needed.

ServiceNow Mandatory Checkboxes

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Field Styles for Service Catalog Variables

Friday, 03 December, 2010 07:45 Written by Mark Stanger
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ervice-now.com allows you to modify the CSS style of any field by adding a personalized style. Instructions for performing this customization are outlined on the Service-now wiki. There isn’t a built-in way to do this same thing with the fields (variables) in the Service Catalog. Applying styles to service catalog variables is possible however through the use of catalog client scripts. This article shows you how.

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Are YOU a ServiceNow Jedi?

Saturday, 27 November, 2010 12:30 Written by Mark Stanger
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Whether you’re a new administrator or an experienced consultant, you need to know these things to become a master of the ServiceNow force.

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Change the Size of a List Collector Slushbucket Variable

Wednesday, 24 November, 2010 01:33 Written by Mark Stanger
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List collector variables are a great way to collect multiple pieces of information about referenced records in a single variable in the Service Catalog. One complaint I get about these variables is that they take up a lot of space on the screen. While there’s not a lot you can do with regular slushbuckets in the system, List Collector variables have a little bit more flexibility because they can be manipulated with client scripts. Check out the SNCGuru List Collector archives for more examples of cool List Collector modifications you can use.

In this article I’ll show you how you can reclaim some of that Service Catalog screen real estate by modifying the size of a list collector variable using a catalog client script.

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New Call Call-taking Application

Tuesday, 23 November, 2010 04:58 Written by Mark Stanger
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While most IT departments do their best to educate their end users and help them to solve their own problems as they come up, the need for users to contact the Service Desk is something that will always be there. Ideally, this contact takes place through a support tool like Service-now but chances are you’ve still got users who will contact the Service Desk directly by phone. As a result, Service Desk agents spend a lot of their time taking calls and logging tickets for those calls.

One of the challenges that I’ve seen a few times before with this type of arrangement is that people will call the Service Desk and start explaining who they are and what their problem is but the Service Desk agent doesn’t know if the end result of the conversation is going to be an Incident ticket or a Service Request. The way most of the forms in Service-now are set up requires you to make a determination about the type of ticket before you can start logging details about that ticket. As a general rule however, the Service Desk really needs to start recording the Caller information and the details of the call before they determine what type of ticket needs to be logged.

I worked with a co-worker of mine (Brad Hicks) to create the New Call application to help solve this problem. This custom application has been used by quite a few customers since as a standard Professional Services offering and has even made a couple of appearances at the Service-now ‘Knowledge’ conferences. I’ve been meaning to document the solution for a while and capture it in a redistributable update set. At long last, here it is!

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Multiple Checkbox Variables in Service Catalog and Surveys

Tuesday, 09 November, 2010 11:02 Written by Mark Stanger
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I just learned something new today about working with checkbox variables/questions in Service-now.com. Even though I’m probably one of the last people to figure this out, I’ll post it here so at least I can find the solution again when I need it!
Service-now allows you to set up variables or questions for use in data collection when working with Service Catalog or in Surveys. One of these variable types is the checkbox variable. The way that these variables works has always bothered me. The problem I’ve always had with them is that the system wants to group them all together and gives them a generic label of ‘Options’ when they are presented on the screen like this…

There are a couple of things I don’t like about this arrangement. First, the ‘Options’ label just looks bad. I’d really like to change that name to something else. Secondly, just because they follow each other in order doesn’t mean that I want to have all of those checkboxes grouped under a single question when presented on the screen. They might be asking completely different things. Well, it only took me 3 years but I’ve got a solution now that requires nothing more than a little bit of care in the arrangement of a few variables on your catalog item or survey. :)

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