Application Development
Mobile in Madrid One of my favorite things in Madrid is the changes to Mobile. This will be a multipart series as we have a great deal to cover. Right off the bat, there is a whole new native app in the iOS and Google Play stores. ServiceNow Agent is its name. The previous mobile app is now named ServiceNow Classic. This single App will be the basis for all of the new targeted applets and experiences you make for your users.
Much of the work for Flow Designer in the Madrid release has been towards achieving feature parity with Workflows. That is to say that any work that could previously be done in a Workflow could now also be done in Flow Designer. Here is one of those features.
Do Until Loops This is a common bit of logic that is needed in any programming context, and now it is available in Flows.
Payload Builder A handy new feature in Madrid is the payload builder. This allows for reasonably simple name-value pairs payloads to be crafted into a payload object. The ability to use the inputs combined with a payload builder lowers the bar for building dynamic integration actions.
You can see the Name-Value pair setup is pretty straight forward using the data pill setup that is now familiar in Flow/Action Designer.
One of the things that I personally enjoy exploring each release is what has changed in the Automated Test Framework. This is a capability that I love and I like watching it improve to the point where organizations can capture ever more of their testing needs with it. Let’s look at some of what is new in Madrid.
Parameterized Tests One of the impediments to using the ATF at scale has been the handling of large quantities of test data.
Decision Tables The first feature in Madrid I am going to highlight is Decision Tables. These decision tables are a place to store the decision logic for variable situations. Each decision table record (sys_decision) handles a single decision. Related lists are the decision inputs (sys_decision_input) and decision (sys_decision_question) records. Each decision record contains an answer.
Our example will be for routing after hours service calls. We take multiple inputs in the form of location, time of submission, and the service.
GlideRecord To start the new year, I want to dive into the depths of the GlideRecord object and how this information can make you a better developer. This article will be at a reasonably advanced level but should be valuable for most any level of ServiceNow developer. We will utilize a variety of tools to expose the details of GlideRecord under the hood.
The easiest way to inspect the details of the fields and values that are available to the GlideRecord object and when they are available is the script debugger.
Virtual Agent Virtual Agent is a new feature in the London version of ServiceNow. I have dived deep into this new feature to share with you. Virtual Agent is a form of chatbot which helps guide users with conversation style interactions to get them the information they need or aid them to input a request to your ServiceNow instance. The guided interaction can result in delivering the user a knowledge article, helping them fill out and submit a request, or get them to the right human support queue.
Walk-up Experience We are continuing with our Walk-up Experience example from two weeks ago to feature another platform capability added in London. The Walk-up Experience plugin is the first plugin I am aware of that uses Interactions. This is why we are going to be using it as our example to help explain Interaction Management.
Interaction Management ServiceNow has long had a Service Desk Call plugin that in some ways is the spiritual predecessor to Interaction Management.
Walk-up Experience Why are we featuring Walk-up Experience in a technical blog you might ask yourself. Reasonable question. The answer is because two new technical capabilities are enabled in London, which is utilized in the new Walk-up Experience plugin available in London. Let’s dive into these new capabilities. This week we will explore Extension Points. In two weeks we will explore Interactions.
Extension Points The first new feature we will explore is Extension Points.
Flow Designer is a great tool to create business logic, particularly by those outside of traditional development roles: process owners, subject matter experts and the like. However, it is almost certain that sooner or later they will want to create Flows that require Actions that do not exist in the baseline system nor easily available Spokes. So then what? My suggestion is that this is where the traditional developers should step in, by creating Actions for use by those business users who don’t want to get deep in the implementation details.
