TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2012

Category: System UI

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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Creating a Knowledge Search Homepage Widget

Monday, 06 June, 2011 07:57 Written by Mark Stanger
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couple of weeks ago at Knowledge11 I presented a session on Advanced Incident Management. One of the topics discussed there was to help your users help themselves by finding solutions in a knowledge base. A simple way to make this more of a focus for your end users is to add a ‘Knowledge Search’ widget to the top of their homepage.
Even if you already have this functionality in your instance, this should serve as a good tutorial on adding any new custom homepage widget to your ServiceNow instance.

Knowledge Search Widget

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Expand/Collapse All Separator Modules at Once

Tuesday, 17 May, 2011 07:37 Written by Mark Stanger
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few weeks ago I helped a co-worker with a requirement they had to allow users to easily collapse and expand all of the module separator sections under the ‘Configuration’ application in ServiceNow. The ‘Configuration’ application is loaded with modules for all of the CMDB classes in the system. While this may be useful for admins, it can also be a lot to look at all at once under the application. Of course, you can expand and collapse the module sections to more easily display these modules but there are also about 12 of those to do! What the client wanted was to be able to click once and expand or collapse all of the module separators at once.

While this solution probably isn’t for everybody, it might save somebody some work down the road so I’ll post it here :) .

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On-call Calendar Popup UI Macro

Monday, 09 May, 2011 10:24 Written by Mark Stanger
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ere’s a UI macro that I’ve used for a couple of clients that allows you to pop open an on-call rotation calendar for the group selected in any ‘Group’ reference field in the system. This will probably be most useful for the ‘Assignment group’ table that you use on the task table. As with any reference field UI macro, you can add the UI macro to your reference field by adding the ‘ref_contributions’ attribute to the dictionary entry of your reference field. So this macro would require the ‘ref_contributions=show_group_on_call_calendar’ attribute. Since it displays on-call information, it is also dependent on the ‘on_call rotation’ plugin being installed.

On-Call Calendar Macro

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Cool Collapse/Expand Animation Effect

Tuesday, 19 April, 2011 06:31 Written by Mark Stanger
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ave you ever wondered how Service-now does the collapse and expand animations in the application sidebar? This same animation effect is also used when collapsing form sections or displaying service catalog variable hints. I discovered last night how this is done and you can do it to with a simple script!

ServiceNow Collapse-Expand Effect

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Adding a Logo to Public Report Pages

Wednesday, 30 March, 2011 09:24 Written by Mark Stanger
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ne of the features of the Service-now reporting system is the ability to publish a report so that unauthenticated users can view certain reporting information about your environment. When a report is published, the system gives you a public URL that you can make available to your users. Users viewing a published report will see the report, but no additional information about your Service-now instance or company. In some cases, it may be desirable to add some identifying information to these published reports (like a company logo). In this article I’ll show you how that can be done.

Public Report-Logo

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Adding Referenced Records Without Leaving the Form

Thursday, 24 March, 2011 05:13 Written by Mark Stanger
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ne problem I’ve seen a few times is the need to create a new record on the fly in order to populate it into a reference field. This problem recently came up for me with a client I’m working with so I decided to come up with a good solution. An example scenario would be a technician filling out an incident record for a user that doesn’t yet exist in the system. At first glance, the solution seems simple enough…simply navigate to the user form and create the new user, then create your incident record. While that can be done, it’s not always so simple. What if the technician has just spent several minutes filling out the incident and then realizes the caller doesn’t exist? The user would then have to navigate away from that incident record and lose all of the changes, or open an entirely new browser window to create the user and then return and populate the field.

Fortunately, there is a better way if you know how to leverage UI Macros and GlideDialogWindow QuickForms. This article shows a solution that you can use for any ‘sys_user’ reference field in your system. It can also be easily modified and applied to other reference fields as well.

GlideDialogWindow-Add User

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Pause or Toggle a Time Worked Field Timer

Tuesday, 22 February, 2011 07:57 Written by Mark Stanger
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here are several ways to do time tracking in Service-now. One of the ways used frequently (especially in Incident Management) is the ‘Time Worked’ field. The Service-now wiki describes this functionality. I often see the requirement to have some control over the stop/start of this Time Worked field for customers using this functionality. This post describes the approaches I’ve used in the past to meet this need.

Toggle Time Worked

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Creating a Custom Slushbucket Popup Dialog

Tuesday, 04 January, 2011 09:29 Written by Mark Stanger
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appy New Year! Hopefully everybody had a great holiday. Mine was spent mostly helping my kids to break in some new toys :) . I did get some time to play with some new Service-now ideas as well. I’ll be sharing some very cool stuff here on SNCGuru over the next couple of weeks.
I’ve seen a couple requests recently for a way to allow users to select items from a slushbucket popup dialog. The most common reason for this is to help manage manual group approvals on a task record. If you’ve worked with group approvals at all, you’ve probably noticed that they work a little bit differently than regular approval records do. Group approval records are really just task records so you can’t just hit an ‘Edit’ button and add groups to be approvers on a task. Instead, you have to repeatedly click the ‘New’ button and create a new task record for each approval group. Normally this isn’t an issue because group approvals are typically managed in workflow but if you’re manually adding a lot of these, the process can be fairly tedious.
This article shows how you can provide a better UI by creating a slushbucket popup dialog that allows users to select one or many groups to add as approvers on a task. Even though the solution is designed for a specific use case, I’ve tried to make the example shown here generic enough so that you can easily modify it for other uses as well.

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Cool Tip! Show and Hide Loading Dialog Frames

Tuesday, 04 January, 2011 06:36 Written by Mark Stanger
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ere’s a very cool (and simple) secret that allows you to show and hide loading dialog screens. These scripts can be run from anywhere in your system that supports client-side javascript.

You’ve probably seen these used in various places in your Service-now instance, most notably in List V2 rendering.


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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...