New for Developers in Madrid: Mobile Offline

#Madrid Release , #Mobile , #Mobile Studio , #Offline

Andrew Barnes

2 minute read

Offline for Mobile

As promised we will cover more of the Madrid mobile features. Today we will look at the ability to configure and use offline abilities in the new mobile application. Offline on mobile devices opens up the locations and types of applications that can be deployed to your workforce.

The offline mode must be installed by ServiceNow, which means you need to use HI to request the plugin for customer instances. For personal developer instances, you can use the developer site management to activate the plugin. Screenshot provided below.

Plugin Request

Once you have the plugin enabled the toggle for available offline becomes useable. It is located on the properties page of each applet. The application also needs to have an offline property set. The applets in the application that don’t have offline capabilities will be greyed out when in offline mode.

Applet Properties

Now it is time to have a look at the mobile experience since we have enabled our application and applet for offline access.

Offline Setup Screens

We start with downloading records so that we can build a local cache of the records we need from the applets that have offline turned on. This cache needs to be refreshed before going offline for the best results. Now that we are offline we can see the unavailable applets in our interface.

Applet grey

Our VIP applet is available, and we can see our records and interact with them. Any changes we make to these records in offline mode will get stored and sent to the instance when we leave offline mode. You can see our comment is a different color, representing that it has not been sent to the ServiceNow instance.

Offline Comment

Once we have returned to an area with the network, we can go back online and sync our changes back to the instance.

Go Online

Our VIP incident comment is now synced and sent to the user.

Comment Sync

These offline capabilities allow for flexibility for your users. There are settings to help control what and how offline is controlled that you can read up on in the documentation. Enjoy building and providing this exciting capability to enable your workforce.

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