Quickly Move Changes Between Update Sets

We've all been there. -- You've been wired in, hammering away on code, making great progress on several fronts, when all of a sudden you're gripped with dread. You check the sprocket menu at the top-right, cautiously hopeful... but as it loads, and recognition sets in, the reality of the situation crashes into you like a sack of pidgeons.

You forgot to select your update set. 

At this point, it is perfectly reasonable to curl up into a ball and weep at the fact that you're going to have to sift through hundreds or even thousands of updates in the Default update set in your busy environment, picking out the ones that are yours and that are relevant to your current work, manually opening each record one at a time, and moving them to the correct update set. 

But here's a better idea -- What if you could just tick the box next to each update, click a button, and dump them all into your current update set? 

Join me after the break and not only will I show you how to do that, but I'll give you an update set that you can deploy to enable that functionality in a matter of minutes! 

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Customize the Reference Icon Pop-up

As most ServiceNow users know, when you hover over the icon next to a reference field on a given form, you can see some details about the record that's being referenced. 

Well, what if you want to customize what fields are shown in that pop-up reference view? 

When a requirement came through to do just that in my instance, I was stumped for a good long while, chasing down some inaccurate/outdated documentation, but eventually I figured out the following process. 

Join me after the jump to see how to modify this pop-up view. 

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ServiceNow: Geneva & UI16 - What's new

Brace yourself. Geneva is coming. 

Personally, I'm excited - I like new things. I've always been the early adopter. But I know that not everyone is as gung-ho for the future as I am, so I thought I'd share some tips and tricks on ServiceNow's "Geneva", and the new, drastically overhauled "UI 16" that will be the new place where most of us ServiceNow developers spend our daily 8-12 hours. 

Note: This is part 1 of a 2-part series on ServiceNow's Geneva update. This part will focus on the interface, and stuff you're likely to run into on day 1, as well as basic stuff you'll need to know so you don't shoot yourself in the foot. A more in-depth exploration of the different process areas such as changes to Knowledge Management, Change Management, performance, security, and so on - is forthcoming. So subscribe, and stay tuned! 

Join me after the jump, and learn what's new in Geneva from the perspective of an admin, a developer, and a user - from the browser-based IDE and the new way to elevate permissions in high security mode, to the basics of navigation in the new world... of Geneva. 

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Detect/Prevent Update Set Conflicts Before They Happen

Do you have multiple developers working in the same instance? If so, there's a good chance that on at least several occasions, one of them has "stolen" an update/record from another. I'll explain what I mean by way of an example:

  • Developer A is working on a project that involves changing a script include. 
  • Developer B, working in parallel on a separate task, also changes the script include.
  • The update sets are pushed. Depending on the order, at least one developer is likely to see results in production that they do not expect based on their development. 

So, how can we prevent these kinds of conflicts/confusion? 

What if we could alert a developer whenever they're viewing a record that is captured in another active update set, that does not belong to them--

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Array.indexOf() not working in ServiceNow - Solution!

I'm baffled that this little issue has never cropped up for me until now, but I recently discovered a little annoyance in ServiceNow while iterating through an array. This issue had me going round in circles for hours, so hopefully by sharing my findings with our readers, I can spare some folks the frustration I felt.

First, I'll tell you a little story about how it happened to me, and then I'll tell you the explanation for this odd behavior.

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Understanding Dynamic Filters & Checking a Record Against a Filter Using GlideFilter

I recently found myself in a situation where I had to check if a given record (the 'current' object in my case) matched a filter associated with another record (a client script, in my case). If you find yourself needing to do something similar, it might help you to know about an undocumented Glide API called "GlideFilter".

GlideFilter takes two arguments: 

  1. A glide record containing the record you'd like to check
  2. The query string (aka "encoded query") you'd like to check it against. 

The first argument may be self-explanatory - it's a GlideRecord object containing a single record.
The second argument, if you're not familiar with encoded queries, is a string of text that represents a query. If you've ever built a query in a condition builder, you've built an encoded query.

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Easily Clone One User's Access to Another User

If you're a ServiceNow Admin, chances are you get lots of tickets from people asking you to grant or revoke access to this or that.
Sure, onboarding and offboarding, and some basic permissions work, can be automated -- but sometimes you just don't have a catalog item for what the user is requesting, so you have to do it manually.

sigh

So if you're like me, you get these tickets all the time: 

"Jerry doesn't have access to the same applications as the rest of our team. Please add him to whatever groups he requires to do his job. Nerd." 

Unless you're intimately familiar with Jerry's job, you're going to need some more information to go off of. I normally ask for the ID of another user whose access I can clone, and then open each profile on a separate monitor and go through each group one at a time. I once did 77 groups this way, for two separate users. It was a nightmare...

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