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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!
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
I‘ve written before about some customizations that can be made to the catalog checkout screen in Service-now. The catalog checkout screen gives users one last opportunity to review their order and provide some additional details about the overall request before submitting an order. One common customization request I’ve heard before is to add additional fields to this checkout screen.
This article is an extension of an idea presented on the Service-now wiki that shows one way to approach this problem. The solution described here overcomes some of the problems with the wiki solution and gives a little bit more detail about how the solution works so that it’s easier for you to customize on your own. I’ll also include some formatting examples and show how you can add more than one additional field to the checkout screen.
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f you’ve used the two-step catalog checkout before you’ve noticed the few fields on the final checkout screen. Users can provide information about the Requester and their location, along with some special instructions for the processing of the request. These fields are all optional however, so there’s no way to force a user to fill any of this information out. If you did need to force one or more of these fields to be mandatory, you could accomplish this by making a couple of modifications to the ‘servicecatalog_cart_template’ UI Macro.
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ervice-now reference fields allow you to add custom UI macros (which generally appear as icons) next to the input element for the field. A couple of common out-of-box examples of this are the ‘Show related incidents’ macro next to the ‘Caller’ field on the incident form and the ‘Show CI map’ icon next to the ‘Configuration item’ field. The main problem with these are that they are ONLY available to reference fields. So, if you want to do the same thing against a choice or string field you’re out of luck.
There is a way around this limitation though using JavaScript DOM manipulation. In Service-now terms, you can add the equivalent of a UI macro to any non-reference field by creating an onLoad client script to add the icon and corresponding onclick (or other) event. Here’s a simple example of an onLoad client script that you could use on the Incident table to display a macro next to the ‘Number’ field.
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