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

Creating Task fields


One thing that's important to understand about Tasks in ServiceNow, is that all task records (whether they're changes, problems, incidents, requests, request items, catalog tasks, or tasks in any other table that extends the base system task table) are technically all stored in a single database table. Although in ServiceNow, you see them as separate tables, that isn't actually the case. This is due to the flattening of the task table.

Each task-extending table has a field called Task type [sys_class_name], which defines what type of task it is (problem, change, incident, etc.). ServiceNow groups records with the same Task type, and treats them as though they're all in separate tables, but in the physical database on ServiceNow's servers, they're technically all in one big table.

This fact has far-reaching impacts on the way that the task table should be handled, some less obvious than others. For example, say you want to create a new field on the Incident form: Assigned...