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

Coding best practices


When scripting, there are many ways to achieve the same goal, but keeping code efficient can make it much easier to maintain and work on in the future. Using a few system resources is usually encouraged too, as this decreases loading times and the load on the data center in the cloud.

You will often find that older instances suffer from poor performance because best practices were not adhered to during development. I have been part of minor projects simply to make code more efficient before, and because these are often associated with slow loading times, it can be a great improvement for the user base.

In this section, we will look at how to make sure your script adhers to best practices and how to avoid common mistakes.

First, one type of scripting that is quite common is nested if statements. This is an if statement after an if statement and is often used to catch several potential values for the same variable. We can see a server-side example of what this looks like...