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About Tim Woodruff
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Blog postIntroduction Very often, we’ll find ourselves writing a custom application (whether scoped or global) that requires some “setup” by the admin who installs it. Maybe we’re writing the app to be distributed to multiple ServiceNow customers, each with their own environments and needs; or maybe the app just requires a unique setup process in each instance we promote it to. Whatever the case, I’ve often had cause to want to build my own “guided setup”.
Unfortunately, for some reason, Service -
Blog postHere's a Quick Pro-Tip: If you have an application which requires some setup or initial configuration, write ATF tests specifically to validate that the application is set up properly. Add executing the tests as a final step in your application's Guided Setup, and provide some meaningful output that directs the admin to the right place(s) to fix any issues identified by the tests. For example, I'm building an application now which connects to an outside application running on…
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Blog postProcessors in ServiceNow are (were) actually extremely useful things, though they’re surprisingly not very well-known. They give you a URL you can hit (like my_processor.do) and allow you to run a server-side script, then redirect the user to some other page.
Processors are quite useful for situations like generating a record and then redirecting the user to that record just by navigating to one URL, or - by adding some URL parameters (like my_processor.do?some_param=some_value) autom -
Blog postIt’s finally here! We’re thrilled to announce that The SN Guys (which runs SN Pro Tips)will be joining forces with our new parent company, Jahnel Group! The Jahnel Group team is a passionate and dedicated group of over 100 software engineers with 20+ years of experience in the industry. Jahnel Group has worked closely with SN Guys for the past three years, and it’s been an exciting adventure to grow together. This new collaboration will allow our team to further deliver in the ServiceNow
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Blog postYou’ve just implemented a new instance, process, catalog item, or workflow.
You put all that time and thought, and effort into making sure that everything that anyone could possibly want to know about, results in an email notification to all potentially-interested parties, so that nothing can possibly slip through the cracks!
And yet… somehow… you notice that users are still, often, not taking action where appropriate. Didn’t they get the email!?
You look through the email log -
Blog postIntro When dealing with server-side scripts, the ServiceNow Debugger makes debugging relatively easy (most of the time), as you can actually see into the call stack, and the contents of your server-side variables as you step through your code, line-by-line. When available, that tool is incredibly useful; but unfortunately, it does not work with client scripts.
So, how do you troubleshoot client-side scripts in ServiceNow? Well, since those scripts execute inside the user’s browser, yo -
Blog postAs I mention in my recent interview with Robert ‘The Duke’ Fedoruk (9:46), I truly believe that the highest calling of mankind is to learn, and then to teach.
I’m far from the only person in the ServiceNow developer community who feels this way! This fact is obviated by the incredible community of new and seasoned administrators, developers, and architects who are constantly trawling the community and just looking for ways that they can contribute.
That said, if you’ve spent muc -
Blog postEvery once in a while, I look into the top search terms people have entered into Google or Bing (lol, who uses Bing?) that take them to this site. I do this to see if there are any common questions that people come here looking for answers to, but which I don’t yet have an article to answer. This month, that search term is “Can Script Includes use current”. This article aims to provide an answer to that question.
The question I interpret the question “Can Script Includes use current” t -
Blog postUpdate, Jan 15, 2020: Added a section at the bottom to cover how to handle the application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-type.
If you’ve ever tried to set up an AWS/SNS integration, you know that ServiceNow fails (rather spectacularly) to handle certain standard REST API request “Content-Types”; most notably, text/plain.
In this article, we’re going to discuss what happens when you you try to integrate with something that’s trying to send a plain-text payload, and how you can m -
Blog postThis article was originally written in February 2016, but was last updated on 4/21/19. Attachments in ServiceNow are not as straight-forward as email attachments, and it's not always obvious how to do what you want with them. Recently, I needed to copy some attachments programmatically and otherwise fiddle around with attachments. After finding nothing in the ServiceNow product documentation, and very little through the usual search channels, I figured it was time to write an article
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Blog postHow often have you wanted to do something like look up a record in a table by sys_id, look up a user by user_name, or jump straight to a table in ServiceNow just so you can run a query on it, but found yourself having to wait for the entire table to load, or having to navigate through several pages, waiting for each to load before you can get to the next?
For me, the answer is “multiple times, every single day”.
To that end, I’ve made this video on how to use custom Google Chrom -
Blog postI've had this question come up over and over again in my career:
How do we populate variables on a catalog item or record producer, from the URL?
There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this - for example, imagine you have a generic access request catalog item that lets you choose a group, enter the business justification, and request access to that group.
If you then have a knowledge article about “how to get access to [some system]” that involves filling -
Blog postIf you’re an Android user who uses Outlook (and who among us corporate tools is not blighted by that app on a daily basis?) you may have noticed that the Outlook app for Android has recently undergone something of a redesign.
I haven’t decided if I love or hate the new design personally, but however you may feel about it, it seems that they’ve done a bit more than just change the aesthetic.
That’s right, despite the fact that it’s been an IETF standard since July 1998 (see: RFC -
Blog postOnce upon a time, there was a global, instantiatable “GlideFilter” object. It was a little ugly and unintuitive, but it technically worked; usually. Nowadays though, the GlideFilter object is a scoped-API object (also available to the global scope) that is not instantiatable, and which has… some problems.
ServiceNow is aware of these problems, but - although they continue to use GlideFilter in their scoped apps (such as for vulnerability grouping rules in the Vulnerability application, -
Blog postUpdate Sets are how you track and promote changes to your ServiceNow environment from one instance to another (for example, from Dev to Test, and then from Test to Prod). They’re a great tool for keeping things orderly, but they don’t always tie up into a neat little bow when you need them to - especially ever since the implementation of Application Scope, on which you can see my angry ramblings here. If you work with scoped apps (such as the HR or Vulnerability apps, or a myriad of othe
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Blog postHello, future ServiceNow developer! - I'm Tim Woodruff; founder of The SN Guys. I write most of the articles on this site (SN Pro Tips), and I’m the author of a few books on ServiceNow development, architecture, and administration, including Learning ServiceNow, and The ServiceNow Development Handbook.
I've put together this quick-start guide to learning ServiceNow development, as a sort of map or check-list for going “from zero to credible” when you’re starting out your career as a Ser -
Blog postStarting a career within a new IT niche can be risky, but the potential rewards can be outstanding.
Maybe you're just starting out your career in IT Service Management development/administration/architecture, or maybe you're a veteran of the industry and you're looking for a change. Either way, in this article, we're going to discuss ServiceNow, ITSM, ITBM, and ITOM as a career-path. We’re going to discuss:
Some things you should consider when deciding on your career path
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Blog postI often get questions that go something like this:
When a user submits a Catalog Item, I need to be able to do some validation that requires client-server communication (either a GlideAjax script, a GlideRecord query, or a getRefRecord() query). How can I make this happen?
As anyone who’s read my article on requiring attachments in the Service Portal knows, ServiceNow has been (for better or worse) making some changes to how you are supposed to, and able to, do certain things -
Blog postScenario: You need to perform a very heavy scripted database operation in ServiceNow, on a very large number of records.
To do this all at once, would: (1) slow down your instance, and (2) take longer than the maximum allowable transaction time/sql count/etc. and (3) other bad stuff.
Each operation takes between 10 and 60 seconds because of the additional business logic that needs to run.
You can't optimize the operations, they're simply slow, and there's a lot of them. -
Blog postACLs Vs. Business Rules for security?
Short answer: ACLs.
Longer answer: ACLs, but also sometimes query business rules; but usually for performance reasons more than security.
There are benefits to using Query Business Rules. Namely, performance benefits. This is because query Business Rules fire before ACLs run, which means that not only are you potentially returning fewer records, but you’re also eliminating whatever performance cost may have been associated with the A
Titles By Tim Woodruff
Learning ServiceNow: Administration and development on the Now platform, for powerful IT automation, 2nd Edition
Jun 20, 2018
by
Tim Woodruff
$31.19
Other Formats:
Paperback
ServiceNow Development Handbook (Old): Don't buy this one, you ninny. Buy the second edition. handbook.snc.guru
Feb 12, 2018
by
Tim Woodruff
$200.00
Other Formats:
Paperback
