TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2012

Category: System Definition

Show/Hide Form Section by Name

Monday, 14 March, 2011 12:39 Written by Mark Stanger
13 Comments

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orm sections are a great way to segment information on a form into pieces that make sense to be grouped together. The most common example of the use of form sections is the ‘Comprehensive Change’ form. If you want to learn more about how forms, form sections, and views work I HIGHLY recommend a post I wrote a while ago on the topic. When customers use form sections, the need often arises to be able to show and hide that form section with a client script onLoad or on some changed field trigger.
People have known how to hide these form sections based on an ID number (which corresponded to the order of the form sections on the form). This method works fine, but it fails as soon as you add a new form section or change the ordering of your form sections in some way. Because of this, there has long been a need to hide form sections based on the section name or caption. Nobody has been able to figure out a way to do this…until now. Read on for the details…

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Populate Order Guide on Request Ticket

Thursday, 24 February, 2011 08:25 Written by Mark Stanger
15 Comments

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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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Weekdays-only Scheduled Job

Monday, 14 February, 2011 09:15 Written by Mark Stanger
10 Comments

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ervice-now allows you to run scheduled jobs at various intervals. Out of box, you are given the option to run scheduled jobs like imports on a specific day, day of the week, month, or at some other custom interval. There are certain intervals that just don’t work very easily with the default setup provided. One of these that can be challenging is the weekday-only schedule. In order to get a scheduled job to run only on weekdays, the recommendation is usually to set up 5 different scheduled jobs, one for each day of the week you want to run on. While this works, it’s really 4 more scheduled jobs that you don’t want to set up and manage. With some simple scripting and the use of the ‘Condition’ field, you can set up a single daily scheduled job to handle this scenario.

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Handling Simultaneous Updates in Service-now

Wednesday, 12 January, 2011 08:47 Written by Mark Stanger
29 Comments

It’s not uncommon in any application to have scenarios where multiple people might be working with a single record at the same time. This is certainly true with Service-now (particularly for records on Task tables). You may have experienced frustration while working with an incident record, making updates, and having some of those updates overwritten a few minutes later because somebody else had the record open at the same time and didn’t know about the changes you had made. Because of situations like this, there is often a need to provide some sort of record lock or alert capability that lets people know when other people are working with the same record.

In the past, you may have used the ‘Simultaneous Update Alert’ script from the Service-now wiki to provide this capability. While that solution works fine, and I’ve used it on almost every engagement I’ve been involved with since it became available, it’s pretty limited in the information it provides back to the end user. You just get a simple alert on record submission…no details, no available actions other than to go ahead and submit or cancel, etc.

I recently had a coworker recommend the use of a UI page to provide a little more flexibility to the messaging that comes with the simultaneous update alert on the wiki. I thought this was a great idea and I had some time over the New Year’s holiday so I started working on it. I’ve finally come up with a solution that I’m happy with and have posted it here in the SNCGuru downloads section as the ‘Simultaneous Update Alert’ update set.

Simultaneous Update Alert

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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.

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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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Sending iCalendar Invites from any Task table

Thursday, 09 December, 2010 06:08 Written by Mark Stanger
3 Comments
If you’re interested in this solution, you should also check out the ICS Request Processor, which allows you to subscribe to and pull iCal invites from tasks!

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ervice-now has a pretty simple one-way Outlook calendar integration that you can use to send out iCal meeting requests and updates to assignees involved with a Change request. I’m often asked if this functionality can be used for meeting invites in other tables as well. The answer is Yes! This hasn’t really been documented because it relies on some legacy technology that really isn’t that prominent in the system anymore. In this article, I’ll show you the pieces that make this calendar integration work by showing you how to set the integration up for the change task table.

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Execute Scheduled Jobs From Script

Monday, 29 November, 2010 09:06 Written by Mark Stanger
14 Comments

Scheduled jobs are an extremely useful way to automate processes in Service-now.com and lift some of the administrative burden of the tool off of the shoulders of your Service-now administrators. It’s very easy to create a scheduled job or a scheduled import. Typically there’s no scripting or advanced configuration involved at all. Just set it up with a schedule and let it run! There are some situations where you might need to execute a scheduled job outside of its normal schedule. You can always open up the scheduled job entry and click the ‘Execute Now’ button, but there are also probably times where you’d really like to automate the process based on some trigger in a workflow or state change in some ticket or CI.

This article shows you how you can use script to execute an already-scheduled job on-demand. To do this, you simply mimic the behavior of the ‘Execute Now’ button by querying for the scheduled job you want to execute and firing off the job. Here’s the script…

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New Call Call-taking Application

Tuesday, 23 November, 2010 04:58 Written by Mark Stanger
15 Comments

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
4 Comments

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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The Simple Power of XML Export/Import

Thursday, 04 November, 2010 10:57 Written by Mark Stanger
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Service-now.com makes extensive use of the XML format for storing and transporting system updates and changes. Update sets, System Import Sets, and certain export methods all make use of XML files in one way or another. One feature that a lot of people don’t know about until somebody shows them is the ability to export and import XML files in a Service-now instance. A manual XML import/export can be extremely helpful in the right circumstances and is something that every Service-now consultant or administrator should have in their tool belt. In this post, I’ll explain how simple it is to transport system changes from one Service-now instance to another with a few clicks.

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Latest Comments

  • Mark Stanger: This linkage all happens for you if you use the task survey plugin. You can look on the wiki for more...
  • Vineeth: I want a way in which if a survey is filled in by the user the response are stored in the survey response...
  • 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...