Dave Slusher
As we continue our lightning tour of new developer-facing features of the Madrid release, we touch on some that are not net-new but include relevant changes. Today’s post is one of these. The London release featured the first release of Flow Designer APIs that allowed for invoking Flows via JavaScript APIs. That capability has been beefed up in Madrid and we’ll look at that.
Server-Side Flow APIs The London release had two APIs, startAsync for Flows and SubFlows.
Much of the work for Flow Designer in the Madrid release has been towards achieving feature parity with Workflows. That is to say that any work that could previously be done in a Workflow could now also be done in Flow Designer. Here is one of those features.
Do Until Loops This is a common bit of logic that is needed in any programming context, and now it is available in Flows.
One of the things that I personally enjoy exploring each release is what has changed in the Automated Test Framework. This is a capability that I love and I like watching it improve to the point where organizations can capture ever more of their testing needs with it. Let’s look at some of what is new in Madrid.
Parameterized Tests One of the impediments to using the ATF at scale has been the handling of large quantities of test data.
It is quite common when developing and troubleshooting integrations that a ServiceNow developer may need some logging around API access. This logging can be required in both directions - in outbound API access of some external service or when providing an API for an external service to integrate inward to your instance. In this blog post, we will examine strategies for outbound logging.
Log Levels There are three levels of Outbound Web Service Logging: Basic, Elevated and All.
2018 This has been an exciting year at ServiceNow and the Developer Program. We wanted to take a moment to thank all our readers that come visit the blog.
From Andrew Joining ServiceNow this year and working with Dave Slusher has been a pleasure and I am looking forward to next year. We have traveled around the world in the last few months visiting with developers and writing blogs in airport lounges.
When the Automated Test Framework (ATF) was first released, I published an introductory post about it . I didn’t intend it to be 20 months and several family releases between parts but such is life in the big city. One of the upsides of a slow release schedule is that there are many advances to talk about when you get to Part 2.
The introductory post talked about the basics and authoring a test.
One of the bits of ServiceNow development I have found the most challenging is dealing with Credentials and Aliases, specifically those for OAuth2. More then one session of Live Coding Happy Hour ended in failure specifically because of my inability to grasp a) what was happening at all in the OAuth and Credentials data model and b) where I should be looking for any specific piece of the puzzle. Compound that by the fact that our prime use of this is in our YouTube spoke where we wanted to have something in the scope and the spoke by default but I wasn’t exactly sure what that should be .
Share Spotlight Welcome to the Share Spotlight! Every Friday we will be spotlighting a project from the Share site on the Developer Portal.
Bulk Download & Naming of Update Sets In this installment, we are looking at a utility called Bulk Download & Naming of Update Sets. In true shareable code fashion, this solves one discrete problem and solves it quite well. When you export and download an update set, you get a cryptically named file based on the sys_id of the update set record.
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.
