Book Image

ServiceNow: Building Powerful Workflows

By : Tim Woodruff, Martin Wood, Ashish Rudra Srivastava
Book Image

ServiceNow: Building Powerful Workflows

By: Tim Woodruff, Martin Wood, Ashish Rudra Srivastava

Overview of this book

ServiceNow is a SaaS application that provides workflow form-based applications. It is an ideal platform for creating enterprise-level applications, giving requesters and fulfillers improved visibility and access to a process. ServiceNow-based applications often replace email by providing a better way to get work done. This course will show you how to put important ServiceNow features to work in the real world. We will introduce key concepts and examples on managing and automating IT services, and help you build a solid foundation towards this new approach. You will then learn more about the power of tasks, events, and notifications. We’ll then focus on using web services and other mechanisms to integrate ServiceNow with other systems. Further on, you’ll learn how to secure applications and data, and understand how ServiceNow performs logging and error reporting. At the end of this course, you will acquire immediately applicable skills to rectify everyday problems encountered on the ServiceNow platform. The course provides you with highly practical content explaining ServiceNow from the following Packt books: 1. Learning ServiceNow 2. ServiceNow Cookbook 3. Mastering ServiceNow, Second Edition
Table of Contents (39 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Module 1
36
Bibliography

Understanding the State field


The state of a task drives a tremendous amount of business logic in a typical ServiceNow application. It represents how a task is progressing-whether it should be worked on, whether it actually is being worked on, and when the task is done. This may drive e-mail notifications, be a trigger for service-level monitoring, or be a condition for a security rule, to name but a few.

The State field in the Task table is an integer choice field. This means a number is stored in the database, while the available options are given labels. In general, scripts use the number value while the UI displays the label. This table details the relationship between the two:

Label

Number

Description

Pending

-5

The task exists, but it shouldn't be worked on yet. It may have been created for planning reasons. The convention is that any number less than 0 represents a state that hasn't yet started.

Open

1

The task has been created, but no one is working on it yet.

Work in Progress

2

The task is being...