We are excited to announce the launch of the free widget download page on ServicePortal.io. Since day 1, ServicePortal.io has existed to be a resources and source of inspiration for the ServiceNow Community. With the launch of the new widgets page, we can now share some of the most frequently requested widgets with all of our followers. Not all of them will be complex, many of the most frequently used widgets are pretty simple. Our goal is to develop and give away at least one new widget per month. We believe that collaboration is key to success for all of us in the ServiceNow Community. If you have any suggestions or comments about our widgets, please let us know. View Free Widgets Page
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
Creating a sticky footer in your Service Portal
While developing web layouts, at some point you've probably run into the issue with the footer floating in the middle of the page just below the content. This can easily be fixed with a little CSS magic. Service Portal does support fixed headers and footers, but this causes the footer to stick to the browser window and overlap the content, which is not what we want. We want the footer to always be at the bottom of the page. This is called a "sticky footer". In between Helsinki and Istanbul some major changes were to made to the outer page structure that broke some earlier solutions posted on the community. My goal is to provide a solution that would work with all versions of Service Portal and it's various supported browsers. The Solution: I've chosen to implement the sticky footer using Flexbox as this provides the most amount of flexibility. One added advantage of flexbox is that it also supports variable height footers, which many other solutions do not. Installation: Go to your portals theme record. Select a footer widget, you can use the out-of-box "Sample Footer" as a test. Make sure the "Fixed footer" checkbox is unchecked. Paste the following snippet of CSS into the "CSS variables" textarea, or alternatively you can include it in a CSS Include. [crayon-662116c07b2d2841692805/] It's been tested on Helsinki, Istanbul, and Jakarta using Chrome, Safari 9+, IE10+. For additional information on flexbox, you can check out the following resources: A quick guide to flexbox by CSS-Tricks - here. Solved by Flexbox, a website dedicated to cool flexbox techniques - here. I hope you've picked up something new and useful from this article. Would love to hear your comments and questions in the comment section below.
Opening Headers in the Widget Editor on Helsinki
A defect in some patches of the Helsinki Service Portal prevents header or footer widgets from opening in the widget editor. This video tutorial will walk you through how to fix this.
Full Text Searches in Service Portal
In the stock Service Portal it asks the user "How can we help" and then provides the user with a big search input. This implies that the user could enter a sentence or phrase such as "reset my password" to answer the question, however this will rarely deliver the correct results. ServiceNow provides several search operators for performing full text searches with GlideRecord using ServiceNow's Zing search engine. However the stock widgets in Service Portal are hardcoded to use “123TEXTQUERY321” which works great for single word searches but not so much for searches containing multiple words or phrases. In this example, the simple addition of the word "my" prevented the user from finding the "Reset Password" item. To improve the search results, let’s take a quick look at some of the other options available. Search Operator Description IR_AND_QUERY Display results with exact matches of all terms only (Same as 123TEXTQUERY321) IR_OR_QUERY Display results with any matches of any terms. IR_AND_OR_QUERY First display results with exact matches of all terms, then display results with any matches of any terms Of the above, I recommend using IR_AND_OR_QUERY as this will return the best results across all combinations of searches. When performing a full text search, ServiceNow also adds an additional property to the GlideRecord called "ir_query_score" which contains the relevance score calculated by the system. Administrators can control the scoring for each field in a table with the ts_weight attribute. Here is a quick example of how to search the Service Catalog and return results ordered by relevancy: [crayon-662116c084566266184779/] For further reading, check out: https://codecreative.io/servicenow/gliderecord-full-text-search-explained https://codecreative.io/servicenow/how-to-do-full-text-search-with-gliderecord http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Administering_Zing_Text_Search
How to Avoid “Unsafe” Prefix on Links
If you’ve ever tried creating a dynamic link with a non-standard protocol or prefix (e.g. file, sms, tel, ftp, local) in Service Portal, you may have noticed that it prepends the url with “unsafe” rendering it unusable. The sanitization is a security measure aimed at preventing XSS attacks via html links and is coming from Angular.js which maintains a whitelist of safe urls. To fix this you will need to override the default whitelist by passing in a regular expression to the application configuration. You can do this by creating a “js_include” in your portal theme and include the following script: [crayon-662116c0861ed268510605/] Where you see https?|ftp|mailto, etc… that is the regular expression you will want to update to include your url prefixes.
Free Service Portal Theme!
Thank you to everyone that was able to attend our CreatorCon breakout at Knowledge last week. It was great finally meeting so many of you. Due to overwhelming demand, we are releasing the Presentation and Update Set for the theme we built during the breakout. To keep things simple, I’ve rebuilt the Update Set to not modify any of the out-of-box records and instead create new records. Also keep in mind this theme only styles the homepage and does not alter the content or layout. Once installed, you can view the portal by going to: https://instance.service-now.com/k17 Session ID: CCB4221 Presenter(s): Todd Bashor, Nathan Firth Company(s): NewRocket, Inc. Abstract: Wondering how to get your service portal to align with your branding guidelines? Fortunately, with the right approach, you can quickly and consistently achieve the look you want. In this session, you'll learn how to build a custom theme by correctly applying styles at the widget, page, and theme level and taking advantage of out of the box styles and css variables. Don't forget to rate it on the community
Creating a Custom Theme in Service Portal – CreatorCon Breakout
Wondering how to get your service portal to align with your branding guidelines? With the right approach, you can quickly and consistently customize your portal to match the rest of your branding. In this session, you'll learn how to build a custom theme by correctly applying styles at the widget, page, and theme level and utilize all of the potential of this powerful platform. Register for the CreatorCon Breakout: https://knowledge.servicenowevents.com/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=4221
Let’s grab a drink at K17 and talk Service Portal
Knowledge is right around the corner and we only have a few meeting spots left. Contact us today to secure a time to meet and learn more about NewRocket and how we can take your Service Portal experience to the next level. [contact-form-7 id="3227" title="Let's Meet 2017"]
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