We are pleased to announce a brand new program, ServiceNow Developer MVPs. The MVPs are a collection of ServiceNow community members that are passionate about ServiceNow and share their extensive knowledge freely to help and encourage developers of all skill levels and types. They write blogs, share apps, craft videos, live-stream, contribute to social media, give talks, lead Developer Meetups, answer questions on the community forum and slack all to share and give back to this great community.
Debugging in ServiceNow is am essential skill to master. An array of tools are available to help developers understand what the system is doing and narrow down where unexpected behavior is happening. Today we will look specifically at several ways to debug when doing scripting.
Session Debug A feature released in the New York release unified the session debugging modules. A session is a unique login for a unique user - typically one browser on one device.
Automated Test Framework You have likely heard of the Automated Test Framework (ATF) if you have been working with ServiceNow for more than a couple of months. Introduced in the Istanbul version, it has grown and been enhanced over time to allow for coverage of nearly all client interactions with the Now Platform. Even given that ATF has been present from Istanbul, there are still many existing projects that don’t utilize ATF due to not being available at the start of the project.
Our Spoketoberfest celebration has come and gone. It was a spontaneous event prompted by a conversation in a hotel lounge in Bengaluru India. We hoped for the best but had no real expectations what the participation would be like.
In the final analysis, we had six projects that attracted contributions from six developers (including myself). Although the numbers match, we had a developer commit to two repos and one repo with multiple committers so it wasn’t just one developer per repo.
VS Code Extension
We are happy to announce a new VS Code Extension for interacting with ServiceNow offline. Community-created VS Code extensions have existed for some time. The ServiceNow version hopes to grow with your feedback and use. You can find the documentation on the developer site. As developers, we are not always able to have stable internet connections so that the offline capabilities will be a boon for those situations.
Development Management I frequently get asked about managing development output when using Update Sets. Previous articles have covered individual aspects of update sets and batching before, but this entry will try to put the parts together. ServiceNow has update sets, application repository, plugins, store, share, and GitHub to hold and deploy application files. On top of development itself also contains best practices, code reviews, conflict management, manual testing, automated testing.
Spoketoberfest is wrapping up. Some of you earned your shirt from Digital Ocean (I did this year). Some of you will continue to work on your Spoke to achieve publishabilty after the month has ended. Once you reach the point of feeling ready to publish your Spoke to Share, what then? In this post, I will walk through the steps.
Pre-Publishing Checklist The following are some of the lessons digested from the Spoke best practices document
In the Developer Program, we have been soliciting platform feedback for some time now. Your feedback has gone into product planning around developer tools in the New York, Orlando and Paris releases. We absolutely want to continue to get your feedback but there is a more permanent and robust place for that now - the Idea Portal in Community. Not only can you submit your ideas there, but you can vote on other submissions and track the state through its lifecycle.
Now Creators A new program to highlight your achievements in the Now ecosystem. Connect with other innovators and problem solvers through the Now Community. Visit Now Creators to setup your profile. On the site you can check out your badge progress towards Administrator, Developer, Implementer, Business Process Analyst, and Service Owner.
As you can see from my profile above I have opted to share some badges, bio, location, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
In a recent Live Coding Happy Hour we attempted to create some Dynamic Choices and Data Gathering Actions. That effort ran into some technical hurdles during the session but they have been sorted now. There are parts of this that are a little finicky, so I will walk through the necessary pieces.
Why Use Dynamic Choices? The use case of this example is a good one for showing the power and necessity of Dynamic Choices.
