It’s a pretty common requirement to include images in your widgets, for example replacing the icons with images in the “Icon Link” widget (available here). However, if you have ever added an image field to one of the instance tables, you may have noticed that the images were not included in the update set. This obviously makes it difficult to migrate the portal between instances. The good news is there is a simple solution. SYNCING ATTACHMENTS First, go to a record within the table where you would like to sync attachments (e.g. sp_instance_link) Right click the heading > Configure > Dictionary Select the record where “Type” is “Collection” Click the “Advanced View” related link Paste the following into the Attributes field: [crayon-6628fa07eca70151398953/] When completed, it should look like this: Now, the next time you save or update the instance record, the image data will also get included in the update set. NOTE: If you wish to use the image field on all instance tables, you can create the field on the base “sp_instance” table. However, you will still need to follow the steps above for each one of the extension tables where the image field is used.
SCSS Variables in Service Portal
Learn how to streamline your stylesheets in Service Portal by utilizing the full power of SCSS. In this tutorial, I'll walk you through how to use CSS Variables in your widgets, so that they can be overridden in the Theme and Portal records. This is very useful when creating highly reusable widgets, themes or in situations where you have multiple portals sharing a theme. SCSS is a subset of the Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets (Sass) specification and is an extension of CSS. Every valid CSS stylesheet is valid SCSS. SCSS supports the following: Variables Variables are a way to store information that you want to reuse throughout your stylesheet. You can store things like colors, font stacks, or any CSS value you think you want to reuse. SCSS uses the $ symbol to make something a variable. Nesting SCSS lets you nest your CSS selectors in a way that follows the same visual hierarchy of your HTML. Operators SCSS has a handful of standard math operators like +, -, *, /, and %. Mixins A mixin lets you make groups of CSS declarations that you want to reuse throughout your site. You can pass in values to make your mixin more flexible. Functions SASS supports the use of functions by providing some keyword arguments, which are specified using normal CSS function syntax. Quick note: The order of CSS that is shown in the video is based on the Kingston release. In Jakarta, the Theme variables were loaded before the Portal variables. For further reading, check out the following resources: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/helsinki-servicenow-platform/page/build/service-portal/concept/scss-primer.html https://sass-lang.com/guide https://devhints.io/sass https://www.tutorialspoint.com/sass/index.htm
Service Portal Features of London
By now all of you should have noticed that you can request a personal developer instance of ServiceNow running the latest London release. Also with the new London release comes several new enhancements to the Service Portal. Here's a quick highlight of some of the new features: Faceted Search The Faceted Search widget replaces the Search Page widget and adds support for: Faceted Search Filters Pagination What's awesome: I love that the facets live as part of the search source so that we can customize the facets as well as add custom facets to our search sources What could be improved: The whole search page is a giant widget including the typeahead search and the breadcrumbs. This makes it difficult to customize. What if we have a theme without breadcrumbs? What if I want to move the search? Having the whole page be one giant widget is just not a good idea. It does not improve the typeahead results which is how the majority of users use the search Virtual Agent Enable your users to interact with a chatbot or live agent through various Virtual Agent interfaces. What's awesome: Nice modern interface Integrates nicely with Connect Chat What could be improved: It's not free (requires additional licensing) Takes a really long time to load Guided Tours Create a guided tour for a Service Portal page to guide users through the content step by step. What's awesome: Supports auto launch Supports (limited) HTML Easy to use designer interface What could be improved: No support for page overlays (darkens the page behind the dialog) Dialogs don't stay fixed when the user scrolls the page Automated Test Framework Write automated tests to validate Service Portal forms. What's awesome: We now have support for automated tests in Service Portal What could be improved: So far it's just limited to forms and service catalog Validation Scripts Validate user input in a specific field type using a validation script. My thoughts: As far as I can tell, this validates field types and not tied to a specific table, also would not affect catalog items or record producers... so honestly, I'm not really sure when this would be useful. If you know of some common use-cases, I'd love to hear them in the comments. For further reading, please see the official ServiceNow London Release Notes for Service Portal.
Widgets and Demo Portal from our K18 Service Portal Sessions
Due to popular demand, here is a quick video highlighting the portal and some of the widgets we showed during our CreatorCon sessions at Knowledge18. We've made the following widgets and applications available for download: Gamification for Service Portal https://serviceportal.io/gamification-in-service-portal/ Unlocking Service Portal Widgets https://serviceportal.io/downloads/k18-creatorcon-example-widgets/ If you've found this content useful or if you have any special requests for upcoming posts, please let me know in the comments below.
The Road to Kingston: Order Guides (Part 3 of 3)
This is a 3 part series that will take a deeper look at the new Service Portal features found in the Kingston release. In case you missed part 1 or 2, checkout the link below. Part 1 - Announcements Part 2 - Route Maps Part 3 - Order Guides Link to official ServiceNow documentation Order Guides The new order guide widget provides a greatly improved user experience over the prior versions of the widget. Features Along with an improved UI, it also adds some new capabilities: Wizard like interface Support for attachments Removing catalog items from the request Installation The new order guide widget is enabled by default Instance Options Title This does not appear to do anything Bootstrap color This does not appear to do anything Compact Mode Displays only one tab at a time for better rendering on lower resolution devices Enable Show More/Less for Order Guide description on Mobile Enables the Show More or Show Less options for the description of the order guide or the associated catalog items in the mobile view. This enabled by default.
The Road to Kingston: Route Maps (Part 2 of 3)
This is a 3 part series that will take a deeper look at the new Service Portal features found in the Kingston release. In case you missed part 1, checkout the link below. Part 1 - Announcements Part 2 - Route Maps Part 3 - Order Guides Link to official ServiceNow Kingston Service Portal Release Notes Route Maps for Service Portal One of my favorite features in the Kingston release is the new Page Route Maps. Lets say you're working on a new custom portal, but you would like to leave the out-of-box portal intact. One of the custom pages of the new portal is a User Profile page, in the past you would've either renamed the out-of-box page ID, or used a new page ID and then updated any links found throughout the portal. The problem with this is that the links are sometimes hard-coded in the out-of-box widgets, that you would now have to clone just to change the URL. In Kingston this has been solved by simply creating a new Page Route Map. When to use Page Route Maps Cloning out-of-box pages Multiple portal environments with differing pages Restrict access to a page New Configuration Records The following configuration records have been added to ServiceNow to provide support for the new Page Route Maps feature: New Table Page Route Map [sp_page_route_map] New Module Page Route Maps [Service Portal > Page Route Maps] Creating a New Route Map Using our example from before, if we would like to link our portal to a new User Profile page without changing any of the existing links, all we have to do is: Navigate to Service Portal > Page Route Maps. Click New. Complete the form. In this example, the out-of-box page is called "user_profile", and our new page is "user_profile_2". With this new Route Map, any request at the original URL on a designated portal will render our new page. Before: After: Final Thoughts The Route Maps are a great addition to the Service Portal. Due to the Service Portal's modular nature, Page Route Maps finally complete the full circle of being able to quickly and easily change the page that is rendered without changing URL's. h5,h4 { margin-top: 24px; margin-bottom: 18px; } h4 { color: #3d89cc; } .aligncenter { text-align: center; } .entry-content { border-top: 1px solid #ddd; }
The Road to Kingston: Announcements (Part 1 of 3)
In this 3 part series, we'll take a deeper look into the new Service Portal features found in the ServiceNow Kingston release. Part 1 - Announcements Part 2 - Route Maps Part 3 - Order Guides Link to official ServiceNow Kingston Service Portal Release Notes Announcements for Service Portal One of the new features Kingston has to offer is the out-of-box support for announcements in Service Portal. No longer do you need to hack together your own implementation of a News Knowledge Base category to display within the Service Portal. The new Announcements feature gives you a extensive control over the look and feel of an announcement, as well as the content and routing for that announcement. In the rest of this article, we’ll go through the new configuration records for Announcements, as well as some of the cool configuration settings that are included. When To Use Announcements There are a number of use cases for announcements, such as informing employees of: A critical outage New employee health benefits information An upcoming planned maintenance window Feature Highlights Standard styles: Style announcements by creating custom style records where you can set the background color, foreground color, etc. Announcement window: Provide From and To date fields to determine the lifetime of an announcement Portal specific announcements: Select which portal you’d like the announcements to display on Configurable links: Add a link to an existing portal page or custom URL Configurable dismissal: Control whether users have the ability to dismiss the notification New Configuration Records The following configuration records have been added to ServiceNow to provide support for the new Announcements feature: New Tables Announcement [announcement] - Stores announcement information Announcement Style [announcement_style] - This table stores a few out-of-box styling configurations for the Announcements widget and allows users to create their own styles Announcement Consumer Type [announcement_consumer_type] - Stores the Consumer Type values of Banner and Widget Portal Announcements [m2m_announcement_portal] - Stores mapping between Announcement record and Portal record Dismissed Announcements [m2m_dismissed_announcement] - Stores mapping between User record and Announcement record New Module Announcements [Service Portal > Announcements] New Role announcement_admin - Maintain Service Portal Announcements including creating and deleting. Exploring The Announcement Form Most of the fields are self-explanatory but there are a few things worth mentioning: Type field: Contains a watchlist for Announcement Consumers. This is used to tell Service Portal where to render the announcement. Display style field: A reference to the Announcement Styles table, where you can define the look and feel of an announcement by creating or modifying existing styles. Click target field: This field is used to determine if the announcement is clickable, and if so where the user will be routed to. Options include a Service Portal Page record or a custom URL. Dismiss options field: Used to determine if a Service Portal user can dismiss the announcement. Portals related list: If there is no Portal record associated with the announcement, by default, the announcement will show on all portals. If a Portal record is provided, the announcement will only show on those Portals that have been specified. Consumer Types When it comes to displaying announcements in the Service Portal, administrators have 2 options. The first option is the Announcements banner feature and the second option is the new out-of-box Announcements widget, where you can define exactly where in a page the Announcement should be displayed. Given the nature of an announcement, this is generally what you’d like the user to see first, which is why it is included in the header for the Portal. The image below shows the 2 display options, which are references to the same Announcement record. Announcement Styles Looking to change the default blue announcement background to a color that matches your company’s color palette? This can easily be accomplished by creating a new Announcement Style record, which is where you can define the following configurations: Background color Foreground color (text color) Alignment (left aligned or center aligned text) Final Thoughts Although it’s a little frustrating that the Announcements feature cannot be modified since it’s injected behind the scenes before the header of the Service Portal, overall it’s a step in the right direction. The Announcement Styles and Portal related list on the Announcement record was a great architectural decision. What We Like Flexibility of Announcement styles Control over the display of an Announcement by the Portal related list on the Announcement record From and To fields for an easy-to-maintain announcement lifespan User dismissal options What Could Be Improved The Announcement banner is injected above the top of the page, so you have no control over the placement and limited options for styling The ability to provide an Angular template would have been a nice added feature h5,h4 { margin-top: 24px; margin-bottom: 18px; } h4 { color: #3d89cc; } .aligncenter { text-align: center; } .entry-content { border-top: 1px solid #ddd; }
New Service Portal Documentation Page
Great news! We just added a new Service Portal documentation section. This material was originally created by the Service Portal development team. However, the original documentation on GitHub has since been removed, so we have decided to pick up where they left off. Our goal is that the maintenance of this documentation will become a community effort. Check it out here: https://serviceportal.io/docs/
Changes to Service Portal in Jakarta
The latest iteration of ServiceNow - Jakarta - has arrived. With this new release, comes new enhancements, additions, and other improvements to the Service Portal. One of the major focuses of Jakarta was improving accessibility within the portal. New Features Knowledge Base Portal A brand new portal that brings all the features of Knowledge Management V3 plugin into Service Portal. Available through plugin: Knowledge Management - Service Portal plugin (com.snc.knowledge_serviceportal). User Criteria You now have more control over who can see pages, widget instances, and search sources. Previously you could only use roles to control access, now you can use powerful user criteria. Condition Builder The "Data table from URL definition" widget can produce an information table very quickly and now it's even more powerful. It now allows you to graphically build the conditions for the table. Contextual Search Use instance options on a search widget to configure search sources. Contextual Search - Inline Results Not to be confused with the above feature, this new widget will render search results inside any of your record producers for incident deflection. New Portal You can now create a new portal from the Service Portal configuration page. Portal System Properties Module added for setting Service Portal system properties. Page Draft Option Restrict page access to admins only by setting a page to "draft". Enhancements Shopping cart enhancements Users have a few additional options with the shopping cart: Clear all items Add a saved bundle to an open cart, or override the existing items in the cart with the saved bundle Catalog Variables All variable types (excluding ones using Jelly) are now supported in Service Portal, although the functionality may not be identical to the platform UI. List, form, and widget improvements TinyMCE HTML editor has been updated Control the number of approvals shown through an instance option Service Catalog related items are now in their own plugin called Service Portal - Service Catalog. This plugin is activated with the Service Portal for Enterprise Management plugin. Accessibility Improvements Many improvements to accessibility were made in congruence with WCAG 2.0 A standards: Many defects fixed High contrast theme to help with those that can't see low contrast colors Define a screen reader title on any container records Server Script API: getCatalogItem() The 'getCatalogItem(String itemID)' method was changed to 'getCatalogItem(String itemID, boolean isOrdering)' Client Script API: server.update() Now sends your URL query parameters automatically to the server
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