Tag: Tech Tips

Mastering Modal Dialog Boxes

Blog, ServiceNow, Tech TipsKelly Cooke

Modal Dialog boxes are a great way to enhance the user experience and provide more detailed feedback to users than a default browser popup.

Recently, we had a challenging set of requirements from a customer. They needed a bunch of mandatory fields (easy enough with UI Policies) but there was a twist—they needed:

  • Fields that were mandatory ONLY if the person wanted to send the record for approval
  • Four fields but ONLY one of the four is mandatory (ie, put data in any one field and all four are good to go)
  • There had to be at least one record in a related list

Modal dialogs are awesome!

We developed a simple approval dialog box for a UI action to cater to these requirements. It’s a good example of how complex requirements can be distilled into a simple solution.

Have fun and happy coding!

Glide Variables

ServiceNow, Tech TipsJDS

ServiceNow uses a special type of super flexible variable to store information in what appears like a single field, but is actually a complex storage/management system with a database column type called glide_var.As each record can have a different number of variables stored as key/value pairs, there’s no easy way of dot-walking to the name of the variable within the glide_var as the names can change from record to record within the same table! You can, however, detect and retrieve variables from a glide_var by treating the gliderecord field as an object.

In this example, from an automated test framework step, you can see each of the variables and their values from the database glide_var column inputs.

var gr = new GlideRecord('the table you are looking at')
gr.get('sys_id of the record you are looking at')

for(var eachVariable in gr.inputs){
gs.info(eachVariable + ' : ' + gr.inputs[eachVariable])
}

If you run this in a background script you’ll see precisely which variables exist and what their values are.

It doesn’t need to be complicated! Reach out to us and we can help you.