Congratulations! You have just become the ServiceNow system administrator for Gardiner Hotels, one of the most successful chains in the region. The CIO realized that ServiceNow fits his needs exactly: it gives him a suite of feature-rich applications built to manage an array of service-management domains, including IT, HR, and facilities.
But what really caught his eye was what the platform brings. All the applications rely on a core set of capabilities, providing powerful logic, data manipulation, integration, and security features. Understanding all these elements not only helps you build your own applications quickly and easily, but it also allows you to understand how every other application works.
This book guides you through creating a custom application in the Helsinki version of ServiceNow. By building an application from the ground up, you will master the core foundational concepts that you can then apply to any other application. Each chapter builds on the last, with plenty of examples providing you hands-on experience in building out each feature.
Because the majority of the examples are built inside a scoped application, you can easily follow along by connecting your instance to a GitHub account. By switching branches, you can jump between chapters without needing to complete all the prerequisites. To do so, fork the repo at https://github.com/gardinerhotels/hotel. Further instructions are given at https://www.gardiner-hotels.com/ and in the first chapter.
Chapter 1, ServiceNow Foundations, looks at how ServiceNow is structured from an architectural perspective. We explore how the platform is hosted and then dive into the building blocks of tables, fields, and building interfaces.
Chapter 2, Developing Custom Applications, explains the controls and capabilities around applications in ServiceNow. Application scopes bring significant changes to the API and bring much better protection to manage the flow of data.
Chapter 3, Server-Side Control, shows you how you can implement your business logic and then start to automate, validate, and verify data and processes.
Chapter 4, Client-Side Interaction, explores how you can make the life of the people using your application a little bit better by providing validation, feedback, and quick interaction techniques.
Chapter 5, Getting Things Done with Tasks, looks at some of the base application functionalities in ServiceNow. Understand how a task-driven process system is kick-started by the Task table and take advantage of Graphical Workflow and the Service Catalog.
Chapter 6, Events, Notifications, and Reporting, introduces another level of interaction with your users, by generating reports and scheduling jobs and handling incoming and outgoing e-mail. Keep everyone informed about what's happening.
Chapter 7, Exchanging Data – Import Sets, Web Services, and other Integrations, is about importing and exporting data from other systems, integrating ServiceNow in your application landscape. No instance is an island!
Chapter 8, Securing Applications and Data, focuses on the challenges of protecting your most important asset: your information. We make sure the right people have the right data.
Chapter 9, Diagnosing ServiceNow – Knowing What Is Going On, helps you when things go wrong. Troubleshooting and investigation hints and tips are explored so that you can get back to full power quickly.
Chapter 10, Packaging with Applications, Update Sets, and Upgrades, builds on the previous chapters to explore how you can get your hard work to the right place. Understand how upgrades work and how teams can work together to get stuff done.
Chapter 11, Making ServiceNow Beautiful with Service Portal and Custom Interfaces, focuses on the service portal and advanced UI techniques. Having a good-looking, well-designed self-service system really enhances adoption. One of the fundamental components of ServiceNow, Jelly, is used to supercharge the interface.
ServiceNow is an enterprise SaaS platform. In order to work with the application, you will need access to a ServiceNow instance, with system administrator access. The examples in this book are about a custom application, but it is strongly recommended that any work be performed in a sub-production instance.
The best way to work through the book is with a developer instance. By signing up to the free program, you can get a fully capable instance that lets you work through all the examples. You can sign up at https://developer.servicenow.com/. Alternatively, contact your ServiceNow representative and request a temporary sandbox instance.
To make use of the source control integration and quickly download the code for each chapter, you will need a free GitHub account. Sign up at https://www.github.com.
The examples have all been built with the Helsinki version of ServiceNow, released in mid-2016. The concepts of ServiceNow are relevant for every version, but it is strongly recommended that you follow along with a Helsinki instance.
This book will be most useful to those who have a good grounding in web technologies and computer science but don’t know too much about ServiceNow. We discuss how ServiceNow implements common design patterns and technologies, enabling you to get a better understanding of how your instance works.
There is a great deal of functionality in ServiceNow, and it simply isn't possible to cram everything into a single book. ServiceNow has a comprehensive wiki and a popular community forum. The ServiceNow training department has a series of mixed-media courses to get you up to speed quickly. We aren't going to replicate those, especially the application-specific ones, but there will be some overlap.
There are several sources of documentation, which are frequently referred to throughout the book. The most common sources are the following:
The product documentation covers the key features and capabilities of the ServiceNow platform and the available applications. It works on a how-to basis, giving you focused help to accomplish specific tasks. Access it at https://docs.servicenow.com/.
The developer portal focuses on the needs of those using the platform building blocks. It importantly hosts the server and client APIs. Access it at https://developer.servicenow.com/.
Every ServiceNow system administrator needs to have at least a basic understanding of JavaScript. JavaScript underpins the ServiceNow foundations and hence is essential to fully master ServiceNow. An in-depth knowledge of all the intricacies of JavaScript is not needed, since many of the idioms and objects used are ServiceNow specific. Nonetheless, scripting is part of the product. A review of a good JavaScript manual may be helpful!
The book also assumes a working knowledge of basic web technologies, such as HTML and CSS, and standard concepts, such as databases and SQL.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Let's run the standard Hello, World! program as our first script"
A block of code is set as follows:
gs.info('Hello, world!');Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
curl --user <username> https://<instance>.service-now.com/u_maintenance_list.do?EXCEL --output MaintenanceList.xls
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "To explore the roles provided in the ServiceNow platform, navigate to System Security > Users and Groups > Roles."
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