TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2012

Category: UI actions

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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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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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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Client & Server Code in One UI Action

Tuesday, 31 August, 2010 05:45 Written by Mark Stanger
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ost Service-now administrators and consultants know how to configure and use UI Actions. UI Actions are UI elements that can show up on a form or a list as a button, link, or context menu. When these UI elements are clicked they execute some JavaScript. Most of the time UI Actions are used to perform some server-side update to a record or records. In other cases, you can use the ‘Client’ checkbox on the UI Action record to execute some client-side JavaScript (including checking for mandatory fields).
But what if you need to do both? The classic case is when you want to click a button to make an update to a record, but only if the user has provided the correct input first. An example would be a ‘Reopen Incident’ button that changes the state on an incident record from ‘Resolved’ to ‘Active’. Usually you want to require the user to provide some sort of comment or additional information explaining why they are reopening the ticket. The problem is that you don’t always want the ‘Comments’ field to be mandatory so the validation needs to happen at the time the ‘Reopen Incident’ button gets clicked. Validation of mandatory fields needs to happen client-side but the update to your record needs to happen server-side. How can you accomplish both of these things with a single UI Action? This article shows you how.

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‘Copy’ UI action for Change requests (Part 2!)

Tuesday, 27 July, 2010 10:42 Written by Mark Stanger
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few months ago I wrote about copying change requests using a UI action. While that method works great, it does require you to specify each and every field and value that you want to populate into the new change request. If you’ve got a lot of fields to copy over then you might end up with a pretty big script and a lot of items to copy over. You also need to be aware of any new fields that get added after you create the script and make sure that they get copied if necessary.

The following method works in much the same way, but it copies by performing an insert against the current record (rather than starting from a brand new change record and supplying each value). Because of this, you’re concerned about overriding any of the values (such as start and end dates) that you DON’T want to be copied over from the record you are copying. This method works better if you know you want to copy over all (or the majority) of the field values from a given change.

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Copying a Variable Set

Wednesday, 19 May, 2010 07:41 Written by Mark Stanger
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his script was designed specifically for easily creating a copy of a variable set but it could be easily adapted to create a copy of any other record (and associated records) in Service-now. Rather than use a field-by-field copy technique, this script works more like an ‘insert’ on the records it touches. Because of this, you get an exact copy without having to specify each and every field to copy. If you don’t want an exact copy of a particular field, you can overwrite it in the script. You can implement this copy functionality to copy a variable set by creating a UI action with the following settings…

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Download Attachments as a ZIP File

Tuesday, 20 April, 2010 22:33 Written by Jacob Andersen
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am really enjoying being here at Knowledge 10 and meeting so many of you who read our posts.  I have been busy in one-on-one sessions hearing requests and helping come up with answers.  One of our readers wanted to know how they would go about downloading all of the attachments on a record as a zip file.  Another reader wanted to know how to send attachments as a zip file via a web service.  I believe this post should help solve both questions.

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Reset change request workflow, approvals, and tasks

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

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‘Copy’ UI action for Change requests

Tuesday, 22 December, 2009 19:24 Written by Mark Stanger
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often see clients request the ability to copy task records.  There are a variety of ways to implement copying functionality and each method has its trade-offs.  Templates, a checkbox field combined with a business rule, or even activating the ‘Insert’ UI action buttons for the task table are all methods that I’ve seen.

In my experience, the best method is to create a brand new UI action button on the table in question.  Below is a script I created to add a ‘Copy’ button to the ‘Change request’ form. This script should be pretty complete for most implementations.  You may just have to customize a few lines to copy over the appropriate fields.  The main advantage that this script has over other methods is that it also copies all of the ‘Affected CI’ records, Change tasks, and attachments for both the Change request and all Change tasks.

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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...