Book Image

Mastering ServiceNow Scripting

By : Andrew Kindred
Book Image

Mastering ServiceNow Scripting

By: Andrew Kindred

Overview of this book

Industry giants like RedHat and NetApp have adopted ServiceNow for their operational needs, and it is evolving as the number one platform choice for IT Service management. ServiceNow provides their clients with an add-on when it comes to baseline instances, where scripting can be used to customize and improve the performance of instances. It also provides inbuilt JavaScript API for scripting and improving your JavaScript instance. This book will initially cover the basics of ServiceNow scripting and the appropriate time to script in a ServiceNow environment. Then, we dig deeper into client-side and server-side scripting using JavaScipt API. We will also cover advance concepts like on-demand functions, script actions, and best practices. Mastering ServiceNow Scripting acts as an end-to-end guide for writing, testing, and debugging scripts of ServiceNow. We cover update sets for moving customizations between ServiceNow instances, jelly scripts for making custom pages, and best practices for all types of script in ServiceNow. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience in scripting ServiceNow using inbuilt JavaScript API.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Testing client-side scripts


Testing scripts in ServiceNow can be done in a few ways. Fortunately, client-side scripts can be some of the easiest to test, because the script is running in front of the user, and therefore, logging and feedback on scripts can be shown directly to the user, too.

Alert

One of the simplest ways to debug client script is to use the alert functionality. alert simply pops up a message window displaying information you choose to include. This can be useful for showing the values of fields or variables at certain times, or simply to confirm that certain functions were entered.

Let's see how alert works in the following code:

alert('Debug Message');

The preceding script will simply show a pop-up message to the user saying Debug Message. It is a simple line of code to write and provides instant feedback.

Let's have a look at how we can use alert to help us test our code:

function onLoad() {
alert('Start of script');
var shortDescBefore = g_form.getValue('short_description'...