TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2012

Category: Graphical workflow

Exporting Graphical Workflows in One Step

Tuesday, 14 December, 2010 11:08 Written by Mark Stanger
9 Comments
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.

I

‘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.

Learn more ...

Change Management Workflow Approval Scripts in Service-now.com

Wednesday, 20 October, 2010 10:25 Written by Mark Stanger
11 Comments

S

ervice-now.com provides a really cool Graphical Workflow engine to help manage workflows for different tasks. This graphical workflow engine is particularly useful when working with approvals for Change Requests. As a Service-now.com consultant I’ve found that change approvals usually fall into just a few different types but new administrators and consultants sometimes don’t know the best way to implement approvals. In this post I’ll share some of the common change workflow approval methods and scripts I’ve seen used before. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this list grow over time and I know I haven’t seen all of the common methods. If you have something you’ve used before please comment on this post or use the ‘Contact’ link above to send in your suggestion to share.

Learn more ...

Wait for Closure of all Tasks in Graphical Workflow

Monday, 16 August, 2010 08:57 Written by Mark Stanger
0 Comments

A

common Graphical Workflow requirement in Service-now is to tell the workflow to wait for some trigger before continuing. The ‘Wait For condition’ activity is available out-of-box and is very simple to configure. Usually when working with Service Requests or Change Requests I am asked how you can set up the workflow to wait for completion of all associated tasks before closing the Request Item or Change Request ticket. This can be easily accomplished by using a script in your ‘Wait For condition’ activity to query for any associated tasks that are still marked as ‘Active’. If the task is marked as ‘Active’ then it hasn’t been closed yet and the workflow should wait for that closure. Here are some sample scripts that I’ve used before to wait for task completion on both Request Items and Change Requests.

Learn more ...

Managing Ad-hoc Tasks in Service-now Workflow

Tuesday, 12 January, 2010 15:19 Written by Mark Stanger
4 Comments
This post is written in response to a question I received from a reader about how to handle ad-hoc tasks when you’re using graphical workflow. I’m always open to suggestions on how to improve the site and its content. If you have any ideas, questions, or suggestions for the site just use the ‘Contact‘ link to submit them. Thanks Ruth!

“The requirement is to add an extra task to a set of tasks defined in a graphical workflow once it is running AND have a way of specifying the order AND have the new tasks start automatically when its predecessor completes and start the next on when it completes.

In the days of execution/delivery plans I had done this using a rule which set the new predecessor/successor entries but can anyone advise how to approach it with workflow?”

Learn more ...

Canceling executing workflows on task closure

Tuesday, 29 December, 2009 05:55 Written by Mark Stanger
7 Comments

S

ervice-now.com provides a very robust and simple way to manage your tasks and approvals (among other things) through its graphical workflow engine.  It is very common to use graphical workflow to help facilitate some change management process within your organization.  One common requirement in change management is to be able to cancel or close the change request at any time during the process.  “Simple”, you say.  “Just allow the user to change the value of the ‘State’ field to ‘Closed’.”

You would not be incorrect in saying something like that, but you would be forgetting about part of the problem with closing or canceling a change request or other task ticket.  What if the attached workflow(s) still think that the change request and its associated tasks and approvals are still in progress?  Should the attached workflow context(s) continue to run indefinitely?  If your workflow doesn’t have a way to know about the completion of the change request then it will continue to run (or more likely just sit and be forgotten).

Learn more ...

Reset change request workflow, approvals, and tasks

Monday, 28 December, 2009 07:41 Written by Mark Stanger
14 Comments

W

hen implementing the Change management process in Service-now you’ll probably encounter a scenario where your entire change workflow (including all tasks and approvals) needs to be reset.  The first option to consider (assuming you’re using the graphical workflow engine to manage the tasks and approvals) is the Rollback workflow activity.  The rollback activity works great for a lot of scenarios, but what if you don’t have a defined point in the workflow where everything should be rolled back?  What if the rollback (or reset) can happen at any point in time?  There’s not really an easy way to handle this within the workflow itself since you would need to check for a rollback condition at an infinite number of places.

Learn more ...

Latest Comments

  • Mark Stanger: This functionality doesn’t connect to an FTP server. See this line in the post above…...
  • Mark Stanger: The report page is back-end XML so there’s no way to directly manipulate the behavior of that...
  • Mark Stanger: Due to some ServiceNow limitations, the localhost MID server option had to be removed.
  • Matt Haak: Is it possible to use this with the local Mid Server (mid.server.localhost) It appears from this community...