TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2012

Posts Tagged ‘UI actions’

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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CI UI Macro Actions for the Affected CIs List

Wednesday, 18 January, 2012 06:12 Written by Mark Stanger
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he ability to associate Affected Configuration Items against a task is one of the most basic pieces of the various task forms in ServiceNow. ServiceNow gives you the ‘Configuration Item’ field to associate a single CI and the ‘Affected CIs’ related list in the event that your task needs to be associated to multiple CIs. I’ve written before about the benefits of tracking all of this information in one place to simplify reporting and usage requirements. During an onsite visit with a customer this week I noticed another opportunity to improve the functionality of the ‘Affected CIs’ related list. It would be very useful to be able to right-click items in the ‘Affected CIs’ related list and show a BSM Map or associated tasks just like you can do for the ‘Configuration Item’ field UI Macro icons. This post will show you how you can set these list context UI Actions up in your instances.

Configuration Item Reference Icons

Configuration Item Context Actions

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Create an Attachment UI Action

Monday, 19 September, 2011 05:41 Written by Mark Stanger
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his post shows how you can easily create an attachment UI action for any form. The attachment capability is part of all forms in ServiceNow and is accessed via a paperclip icon in the top-right corner of the form. In some cases this icon may not be prominent enough for your end users. The simplest solution in that case is to set up a UI action button or link that performs the same function.

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Manually Add a Record to an Update Set

Tuesday, 26 April, 2011 07:14 Written by Mark Stanger
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he primary mechanism in Service-now for transporting configuration changes between instances is the System Update Sets functionality. If you’ve worked with Service-now much at all, you’re familiar with this functionality and know that it can be a huge time saver. You also probably know that there are a few gotchas to update sets that can cause problems if you don’t pay attention to them. One of these gotchas is that not all changes you make in your instance get recorded in update sets. Of course, this is by design and it’s usually a good thing that saves you from problems. There are, however, some situations where you need to capture updates to a specific record in a table even though you don’t want all of the records in that table being captured. In this article I’ll show you a solution to this problem.

Manual Update Set Inclusion

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Exporting Graphical Workflows in One Step

Tuesday, 14 December, 2010 11:08 Written by Mark Stanger
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While this article is still extremely useful as an example and a reference for exporting records and use of processors, the specific functionality for exporting workflow versions is now included by default in ServiceNow. The functionality was built-in starting with the Aspen release.

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‘ve written before about how you can quckly export and import data between Service-now 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. One example of this is Graphical Workflows. The components that make up a Graphical Workflow version are actually stored in 7 separate tables. It is possible to export a graphical workflow version but you have to do 7 separate exports to do it! In this post, I’ll show you how you can set up UI actions for some of these more complex export tasks.

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Direct User Impersonation From a User Record

Friday, 10 December, 2010 06:53 Written by Mark Stanger
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very now and then I get a tip from a SNCGuru reader. This post comes courtesy of Garrett Griffin who emailed me yesterday with a cool script that his organization uses to allow admins to easily impersonate users without even having to select their name from the impersonate dialog. For those of you who don’t know about user impersonation in Service-now yet, you can read about it here. The method that Garrett shared is more convenient in many cases than the regular impersonate button and it also helps to eliminate the confusion that can be caused in the standard impersonate dialog when you’ve got more than one user with the same display name.

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Identifying UI Action Clicked (The Right Way)

Thursday, 02 December, 2010 07:30 Written by Mark Stanger
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‘ve seen a lot of requests on the forums asking how you can identify the button that got clicked form an onSubmit client script or a business rule. Usually the aim behind these questions is to make some field display or be mandatory based on a button click. While you can use client scripts and UI policy to do these things, there’s no built-in way to identify if a submit came from a particular UI Action. There is a way that’s been floating around for a while that you can do this and while it works, it’s not really the best way.

This post shows how to identify the UI Action that got clicked in an onSubmit script or business rule…the right way. In a single line of code you can return the Action name of the UI action and act on it accordingly.

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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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GlideDialogWindow: Advanced Popups Using UI Pages

Thursday, 23 September, 2010 14:55 Written by Mark Stanger
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his article is the 3rd in a series of posts explaining the use of ‘GlideDialog’ in Service-now. If you want to see all of the articles I’ve written about GlideDialogWindow and popups in Service-now just use the tags at the bottom of this article.

In this article I’ll show you how you can use GlideDialogWindow to pop open a dialog containing any custom UI Page information you want. I’ll also show how you can pass information into those dialogs, and how you can return information from those dialogs back to the standard form that initiated the dialog. These dialogs can be initiated from any place where you can use client scripts…client scripts, UI Macros, UI Actions, etc.

The only warning I’ll give here is this: While it’s very easy to pop open a dialog window using this method, the real work happens in the UI Page contained in the dialog. The purpose of this post is not to explain the complexities of creating your own UI Pages in Service-now. Until I get a chance to write about those, the best recommendation I can give you would be to take a look at the UI Pages you’ll find out-of-box in your system.

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GlideDialogWindow: QuickForms

Thursday, 16 September, 2010 11:06 Written by Mark Stanger
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couple of days ago I wrote about some cool ways that you can show system list information in GlideDialogWindow popups from a form. As promised, here’s another article showing some other ways that you can use GlideDialogWindow. If you want to see all of the articles I’ve written about GlideDialogWindow and popups in Service-now just use the tags at the bottom of this article.

In this article I’ll show you how you can use GlideDialogWindow to update records from a list with a multiple update or a form with an update or insert on a single record anywhere in the system.

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