In my first part , I talked about the background of an application we are building. With this post, I want to get into the specifics of the first big problem I tackled.
In my previous GTD implementation, I used Evernote as the main tool. One of the features I got for free with that was the ability to receive email from arbitrary email addresses. Evernote gives you a private email address that you can use to forward email to the system, where it will be converted into a note.
One of the things dave.slusher and I do every day is read/respond to the feedback you submit on developer.servicenow.com. We recently noticed that a number of developers have been running into an odd dictionary issue. This issue could occur in any app, but I’ll focus on fixing it in the Marketing Events application we build as part of the Building a sample ServiceNow application course.
**The Problem
** Applies to: Helsinki
I have been working on a skunkworks project with ctomasi, josh.nerius and a few other people for months now as a low level background task. One of the downsides in working in an evangelism role is that sometimes you do lots of things to communicate about developing without actually doing any development yourself. In order to change that, we carved out a problem space that all of us were interested in, had an opportunity to improve toolsets and would be something that we ourselves would want to use every day.
Update: An up to date version of this article has been published here
One of the ongoing issues that we deal with in the Developer Program is the continuity of the free developer instances. No matter how well intentioned you are, it is always possible to have a time period where you are out of the office and miss the email about your Developer Instance expiring. I don’t like the idea of anyone losing their work but there is only so much we can do to prevent it.
One of the most requested features of the Developer Program is the ability to choose the version of a developer instance that one gets assigned. The current state of affairs is that you request an instance, are assigned a random one from the available instances. If you choose you can upgrade from there but it is difficult to go downwards once you do that. Some people want specific versions of an instance to match the training documentation they have, or to match production at their workplace or a client.
RestMessageV2 API Applies to: Geneva, Helsinki and beyond.
Have you ever needed to:
Retrieve something using RESTMessageV2 Save that thing as an attachment on a record Do something with the newly generated attachment? This recently came up as a question over in the sndevs slack channel, and I realized that I knew how to accomplish #1 and #2, but didn’t know how to actually identify the attachment to achieve #3 without some ugly hacks.
Photo by Metassus, licensed CC BY 2.0
The Developer Program has grown steadily since it was announced at Knowledge15, and along with that growth has been a corresponding increase in developer instance usage. The ability to give these away for free use for the community of ServiceNow developers is a great benefit and has reaped benefits for the entire ecosystem. However, it does come at a cost. The program was granted a dedicated chunk of infrastructure, and then another chunk later.
2016 Developer Survey Thank you to the 2,646 developers that responded to the survey that was conducted in January. We appreciate the time, feedback and the insights you provided us. This information will play a vital role in continuing to shape the Developer Program around your needs.
Below is an infographic of the results followed by a more detailed explanation of each section. Please give us your comments and thoughts below as well.
One of the new features in Geneva is the ability to write Scripted REST APIs. These take the place where Processors were used previously but have a richer feature set and more flexibility.
Scripted Rest API basics When you create a new API inside the Studio environment, you define a name for it and an API ID (which will default to the name but can vary independently). Based on your currently selected application scope, it will automatically choose that application and namespace which corresponds to your scope identifier.
When we answer the feedback from the Developer portal, the biggest single topic are questions related to the developer instances. The bulk of these break down into one of two buckets:
1) My instance was reclaimed from inactivity - how can I get that restored?
2) I want to request an instance but it says none are available. Now what?
Let’s look at both of those situations with some tips on avoiding negative impact on your development experience.
