TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2012

Category: Client scripts

Change Form Header Background Color

Wednesday, 11 January, 2012 10:35 Written by Mark Stanger
2 Comments

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ust a quick scripting tip today based on a solution that I helped someone with on the ServiceNow community site. The request I received was to be able to change the form header background color based on changes to values in a record. You’re probably aware that ServiceNow provides a global CSS property to set the form and list header color. This is usually one of the first things that gets customized during a deployment. The global property can be found by navigating to System Properties -> CSS, and changing the ‘Banner and list caption background color’ property.

This request required something more dynamic so that the color could change based on specific table and record values and specific changes to a specific form. In order to accomplish this, I came up with a simple client script that can be used anywhere you need it.

Form Header Color Change

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Customizing the dirty form alert popup

Wednesday, 14 December, 2011 06:49 Written by Mark Stanger
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had a colleague come to me recently for help on a client issue. The customer wanted two things; the first was to set up the capability to warn users when they were navigating away from a modified form without saving it, but to do this only on selected forms rather than globally. The second was to modify the text included in the alert dialog to be whatever they wanted. In this post I’ll explain some of the options that ServiceNow provides in this area and how you can get even more flexibility and control over this behavior through scripting.

Custom Dirty Form Alert

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Attach an event listener to a related list button

Thursday, 01 December, 2011 10:37 Written by Mark Stanger
2 Comments

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ecently a colleague asked me for assistance with a customer request. The requirement was to pop up an information or alert message when a user clicked the ‘Edit’ button on the ‘Affected CIs’ related list. The alert message would give them some information or a warning, allow the user to confirm, and then continue on to the edit screen. ServiceNow gives you a lot of control over the behavior of some buttons with the configuration of UI actions. There are other buttons in the system, however, that you can’t easily control…including many related list buttons. In order to meet this requirement I created an ‘onLoad’ client script to attach an event listener and onclick function to the necessary button. Read on to see how it’s done!

Related List Event

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Automatically adjust the height of text area to fit contents

Wednesday, 16 November, 2011 06:48 Written by Mark Stanger
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ere are a couple of script examples you might find useful. Say you’ve got a multi-line text field or variable that contains a lot of text. To save time in scrolling (or clicking the ‘+’ icon next to the field) to see all of the text you just want to auto-expand the height of the field to fit its contents based on some other client-side trigger. Here are a couple of scripts that allow you to do that.

Expand Multi-line Height

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Animate ServiceNow with jQuery and Prototype Effects!

Tuesday, 09 August, 2011 07:11 Written by Mark Stanger
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while ago, I was trying to figure out how I could add some javascript animations and effects to a ServiceNow instance. What I really wanted was something like the jQuery Effects API but I didn’t want to have to incorporate a separate API and deal with the loading the bulk of jQuery everywhere in the instance. I knew that ServiceNow provided some limited collapse/expand effects but I was hoping for a little bit more.

I’m happy to report that I found it! Somebody smarter than me decided to convert the jQuery effects library for use with Prototype (which ships with ServiceNow) and incorporate those effects and animations directly in ServiceNow.

ServiceNow Prototype Effects

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Building a CI Change Calendar Macro – On The Fly

Wednesday, 20 July, 2011 06:39 Written by Mark Stanger
3 Comments

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co-worker asked me for some help yesterday fulfilling an interesting requirement. He needed to set up a configuration item reference field or catalog variable that would display a calendar macro that, when clicked, would open a popup window containing a change calendar report for that configuration item. I figured this idea might be of use to others so I’m posting it here!

CI Change Calendar Report Macro Popup

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Set Default Date/Time Picker Dialog Time

Tuesday, 28 June, 2011 08:39 Written by Mark Stanger
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ave you ever wondered how you can change the default time displayed in a Date/Time dialog? In general, the Date/Time dialog is controlled by back-end code so there’s not much you can do with it. I’ve seen this question a few times now so I decided to come up with a solution.

Date Time Picker

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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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Hiding Related Lists and Embedded Lists

Wednesday, 15 June, 2011 06:19 Written by Mark Stanger
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just saw a question on the ServiceNow forums asking how you could show and hide an embedded related list on a form. I just created some client scripts to accomplish this task so I figured I would share them here. I’ll also review the methods and limitations for showing and hiding standard related lists using client scripting.

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Solving the Client Script ‘Before and After’ Problem

Monday, 13 June, 2011 09:03 Written by Mark Stanger
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very now and then I come across a question dealing with the order of execution for client-side code (Client Scripts and UI Policies). In my experience, the need to order client-side code is pretty rare and really only applies in a few ‘onLoad’ scenarios and even fewer ‘onChange’ scenarios. Usually, the way that a browser parses and executes client-side code means that the ordering is pretty unpredictable. It’s worth mentioning that this issue doesn’t exist with server-side code precisely because the browser isn’t involved (which is why you can neatly order all of your business rules without issue).

In this post I’ll show you some of the techniques I’ve used in the past to provide some control over the order of execution of client-side code. I’ll also show you a pretty cool trick that you can use to ensure that a piece of client-side code runs before any other client script or UI policy…or after ALL of those scripts finish running.

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