Paris Release
As part of the Now Platform Paris release, ServiceNow has added a new capability called the GraphQL API Framework. This API framework allows you to create a custom GraphQL API to query record data from a component or third-party system.
What is GraphQL and why should I use it? GraphQL is a web query language originally created by Facebook, but now open-source, optimized for client-side development. It aims to solve problems like under and over fetching of data, versioning, and endpoint sprawl.
Did you know? Our blogs have a variety of technical depths. Today I will be introducing Did you know? (DYK) which will be quick bites that are easily consumed, today I learned type things. Let us know if you have other DYK/TIL items for us in the comments.
Cross node reporting In Paris a new graph data set has been added to the ServiceNow Performance dashboard. The new data set removes the node selector and reports on all the nodes (up to 47) all in the same graphs.
The Now Experience UI Framework was introduced in the Orlando release as a ServiceNow JavaScript framework built on web components standards. It enables developers to build custom web components and create a modern UI for users. In the Orlando and Paris releases the UI Framework is limited to customizing Workspace.
While Paris wasn’t a huge release for Now Experience, there are a few enhancements that I’d like to call out around new components.
The Now Platform Paris release is now Generally Available! Now that Paris is GA that means that our early access period is over. During the roughly eight weeks of early access, we’ve posted deep dive blog posts on our pro-dev tooling, upgrades and ATF, Flow Designer, IntegrationHub, mobile, virtual agent, and more. We’ve also covered many of those Paris release features on our weekly Live Coding Happy Hour show.
Virtual Agent in Paris has a page full of enhancements that you can check out. We will look at a few of the highlights in this overview blog.
Dashboard A useful dashboard is something that I very much appreciate. Visualizations and aggregation of information into understandable and actionable intelligence is the goal of a useful dashboard. In the Paris release, the VA Dashboard has been enhanced to give more insights to the operations managers and topic authors.
When I was looking through the content of our Paris release the Conversational custom chat integrations framework, while being a mouthful, jumped out at me. I’ve talked to numerous developers over the past year or two about our Virtual Agent and one of the most common questions is something along the lines of: Can I interact with ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent through a different chat tool outside of the OOB Slack, Teams, and Facebook integrations?
The Paris release brought many new features and enhancements to our Mobile functionality on the Now Platform. This post will highlight the top features in Paris that ServiceNow developers should be aware of.
Mobile Filter Enhancement Before Paris, any filtering users did in the mobile application in lists and map applets happened on the client-side. That meant that they could only filter against the columns shown in a list and the data in the current pagination.
It’s Paris mobile week here on the developer blog, and my favorite new mobile feature in Paris is Actionable Push Notifications. These actionable push notifications allow the mobile app user to take an action by hitting a button on the notification itself without having to open the app or a browser. The most obvious use case for this is being able to approve or reject an approval directly from a push notification, similarly to how notification mailto templates have allowed you to approve directly from an email for a long time.
One of the significant advantages of developing on the Now Platform is access to Now Intelligence. I wanted to take a quick look at some of the important improvements in Paris you’ll want to be aware of.
Performance Analytics & Reporting Interactive Filters are now free. Previously, the use of Interactive Filters (including custom Interactive Filters) required a Performance Analytics license. This is no longer the case.B Now you can leverage Interactive Filters on all your dashboards to give your users a more tailored and interactive experience.
IntegrationHub week is still going strong! The last two new Paris related features I will highlight on the blog will be the Payload Builder API and the JSON Parser action step.
JSON Parser Building and extending spokes is one of my current favorite things to develop. One of the most common parts of integration is handling the response. Introduced in the New York release was the XML Parser step. With the Paris release, the other main format, JSON, is handled with the JSON parser step.
