Application Development
Virtual Agent Virtual Agent is a new feature in the London version of ServiceNow. I have dived deep into this new feature to share with you. Virtual Agent is a form of chatbot which helps guide users with conversation style interactions to get them the information they need or aid them to input a request to your ServiceNow instance. The guided interaction can result in delivering the user a knowledge article, helping them fill out and submit a request, or get them to the right human support queue.
Walk-up Experience We are continuing with our Walk-up Experience example from two weeks ago to feature another platform capability added in London. The Walk-up Experience plugin is the first plugin I am aware of that uses Interactions. This is why we are going to be using it as our example to help explain Interaction Management.
Interaction Management ServiceNow has long had a Service Desk Call plugin that in some ways is the spiritual predecessor to Interaction Management.
Walk-up Experience Why are we featuring Walk-up Experience in a technical blog you might ask yourself. Reasonable question. The answer is because two new technical capabilities are enabled in London, which is utilized in the new Walk-up Experience plugin available in London. Let’s dive into these new capabilities. This week we will explore Extension Points. In two weeks we will explore Interactions.
Extension Points The first new feature we will explore is Extension Points.
Flow Designer is a great tool to create business logic, particularly by those outside of traditional development roles: process owners, subject matter experts and the like. However, it is almost certain that sooner or later they will want to create Flows that require Actions that do not exist in the baseline system nor easily available Spokes. So then what? My suggestion is that this is where the traditional developers should step in, by creating Actions for use by those business users who don’t want to get deep in the implementation details.
As Flow Designer gets more real world use, the feature set continues to evolve towards the needs of production customers. In the London release, one of those features is Subflows.
By its nature, Flow Designer is pleasingly fractal in nature. You build a Flow out of Actions. When you drill into Actions, the UI looks almost the same as the Action Steps build into the Action. Subflows are another layer of this fractal, allowing for reuse by building a piece of a Flow that can be reused in multiple Flows or even across the same Flow.
Along with the London release comes new APIs that can be used by developers. Here are a few of the ones of particular interest to ServiceNow developers. The full list is available here.
I have previously posted about starting Flows and Subflows with the startAsync() method, so if you want more detail check that out here .
Glide Security Utils There is a new API called GlideSecurityUtils. This is used for cleaning input and preventing things like script injection and cross-site scripting attacks.
If you have followed my work as a developer advocate for ServiceNow at all, you will have noticed that I love automated testing. Even before the original release of the Automated Testing Framework, I presented on testing at Knowledge15. This is really a chunk of the platform close to my heart. This year at Knowledge18, Boris BC
It is ServiceNow new release season! With the London release in Early Access, we will cover some of the features newly available to application developers. In this post, I will discuss one very specific topic - new ways in which Flows can be initiated. When originally released in Kingston, there were two ways to start a flow: on change or insert of a record or via a schedule. That has expanded, increasing the flexibility of Flow logic.
In New for Developers in Kingston - Flow Designer, Action Designer, IntegrationHub, I touched on the basics of Flow Designer.
In this post, I’ll spend some time exploring Flow Designer in more detail. Instead of trying to look at every aspect of Flow Designer in one post (that’d be a long post), I’m going to walk you through the process of creating a simple flow and we’ll touch on many of the core concepts in the process.
Jakarta introduces an exciting new feature called the Guided Tour Designer. Guided tours interactively walk users through the major components of an application. Here’s a 30 second animation that demonstrates a Guided Tour in action on the SLA Definition table.
The Guided Tour Designer allows you to build tours like the one you saw in the animation into the applications you create. In this post, I’m going to walk through the process of creating a simple guided tour for the “NeedIt” application used in the Developer Training content.
