I’ve worked with the ServiceNow system for about 3 years now. ServiceNow is a combination of a SaaS and IaaS sytem that provides out-of-box functionality for ITIL and general service management functionality.
I’ve worked on development frameworks in older systems of the past. The Glide framework underneath the ServiceNow platform is truly revolutionary for bringing software development into the 21st century. It is well thought out where the developer can concentrate mostly on process rather than re-invent rudimentary code to support application aspects such as navigation and UI form presentation. This is all supplied as part of the core framework. The customer/developer facing elements are stored as configuration elements, including data definition. The customer/developer has no direct access to the backend database. All data definition is stored as meta data using the same semantics into the database as any application developed on top of the platform itself.
Database records are displayed in one of two formats: “list view” where a number of records are viewed in a column/row format and “UI view” where fields on a single record is displayed and possibly a list of related records displayed in the parent record’s view.
Other backend features include a job scheduler, mail server, event handler, integrations using SOAP, REST, incoming email parser, and “runbook”.
The Service Catalog operates as a place where an end user can order something, whether it is physical or a request for service. In its basic form it is presented much like a product and handled as when you buy som e product off of Amazon. Behind the “product” is a workflow attached to process its fulfillment. Service C atalog is a great tool, but not the answer to all situations. This article talks about what it does well an d where it does not fit.
Subflows are separate workflow activities defined to be executed out of a primary workflow. ServiceNow’s documentation gives the basics on how to create the subflow, but lacks on how to link a subflow to a primary workflow and pass data and return codes back and forth. This article attempts to fill in the gaps you can’t get from SN documentation.
One would think that the date/time data type would be cut and dry in terms of computing. After all, programming around date/time has been a feature since the early days of digital computer systems. ServiceNow has to provide backend utilities to perform this translation since the developer cannot reach into the web server backend. Though SN has a collection of date/time utilities, they are scant on formatting and calculation options. You have to roll your own to compensate using the Glide library functions that SN makes available to the developer for translating a system or database stored time into a constant, generic format. This article provides an example for how to create your own date/time utility utilizing the Glide library date/time functions.