As an administrator on the ServiceNow platform, there’s a whole world of shifting priorities that you face day to day
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Protecting the integrity of your platform
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Creating reusable components
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Mitigating deployment issues
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Refactoring scripts
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Evaluating new upcoming platform capabilities
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Building brand new functionalities to address your companies needs.
One of the common things we hear from our customers, is that as an admin it’s often not that you’re lacking information about new products, documentation to help you install and configure, but that there’s... SO MUCH information
it’s difficult, time intensive, and overwhelming to weed through to find that sign-post
pointing you in the direction you need to get started.
As a former developer and implementer of the platform, I’ve been there.
Trying to understanding a new tool and how it bring value to the dev process, but not knowing how to jump straight into meaningful configuration, who has time to dig?
This blog series, Creator Studio for Administrators, is intended to act as a sign-post, guiding you through configuring Creator Studio to fit your company and processes, while enabling your business experts to develop apps that fit your current application development.
Using Catalog Templates
Today we’re going to be creating a Record Producer template to use in Creator Studio.
Part of using new tools on our platform, like Creator Studio, is learning when to use existing tools and capabilities to ensure that this new tool integrates into your workflow.
As an admin looking to bring new line of business users into your app dev, you’ll likely want to ensure that groups can leverage department specific questions, default categories, or limit a template to specific users.
By creating catalog templates, you can streamline and curate this process for your Creator Studio users, and let them get into building out their logic.
We will be using a platform capability Catalog Builder, to create that template, which can then be used by your Creator Studio users.
App Build: TLDR
For those of you that want the quick and dirty without the narrative, these are the steps we'll be covering in this build out:
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Create User Criteria record (user_criteria)
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Create Record Producer template (sc_template)
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Areas of optional configuration: add question sets, set location
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Don't: Set destination table
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Do: Set default overrides
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Selected catalogs
Description
Selected topics
Image
User criteria denied access
Record submission table (* Only required override)
User criteria granted access
Selected categories
Hide 'Add to wishlist' button
Make attachment mandatory
Hide attachment button
Short description
Item name
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Submit
App Scenario
Jen is a ServiceNow platform admin at HarvestLynx, an online grocer.
HarvestLynx has access to Creator Studio as part of their App Engine Enterprise license.
Jen installed Creator Studio following the Washington Store 2 release, She’s had a chance to play around Creator Studio and really enjoys the simplified app building and maintenance.
Citizen development at HarvestLynx currently is comprised of a core low-code app dev team including Jen, several specific groups (HR, Finance) and a catalog building SWAT team.
Jen would like to integrate Creator Studio into the catalog building teams workflow, but in order to do so, she will need to ensure that the catalog building team has their own app template.
Configuring user criteria
In order to get started, Jen wants to ensure that only the catalog team will be able to access this template.
As their lead, Ashiq has question sets he'd like to include and will be modifying their process over the next few months.
Jen will configure user criteria to accomplish this.
From the User Criteria list, we select "New" and create a new User Criteria record, giving it a meaningful name, in this case, Jen names the group "CS Catalog Team"
Jen assigns 3 of her other app dev admins (Beth, Abel and Howard) as users of the Catalog team, she also adds in the Catalog Maint team user group to the criteria record, granting access.
Configuring Catalog Template
Now that she's created her User Criteria record, Jen goes into Catalog Builder to create a new Catalog Template (sc_template)
Once inside Catalog builder, Jen selects "Create a catalog item template", and then selects "Record Producer" as the item type.
In the template, Jen can start defining the parameters she wants to have available to users of the Catalog templateJen assigns a Template name, a Short description, and in the Template available for section, she selects Browse, and then selects the User Criteria she created earlier, ensuring this template will display only to the catalog team.
Reminder: We DO NOT want to add a destination table, as the apps created with Creator Studio will populate the destination with our Creator Studio app table.
Now Jen can start configuring how she wants the template to work and look.
Here Jen can choose if she wants to include a default question set that will be made available for Ashiq and the catalog team.
For now she's leaving it blank, but Ashiq can change this later.
These catalog items will be available to all users, but if needed, User Criteria could be applied on the Access tab to target specific user groups
Here Jen can choose if she wants to include a default question set that will be made available for Ashiq and the catalog team.
For now she's leaving it blank, but Ashiq can change this later.
These catalog items will be available to all users, but if needed, User Criteria could be applied on the Access tab to target specific user groups
The important step for making this Record Producer accessible, is for Jen to add the following on the Overrides tab
| Selected catalogs |
| Description |
| Selected topics |
| Image |
| User criteria denied access |
| Record submission table (* Only required override) |
| User criteria granted access |
| Selected categories |
| Hide 'Add to wishlist' button |
| Make attachment mandatory |
| Hide attachment button |
| Short description |
| Item name |
These override items are the restrictions applied to the application that will be created by Creator Studio users leveraging this custom template.
Once the overrides have been added, Jen can now review and submit this Catalog template, making it active. Since she assigned the user criteria, Ashiq and his team will now be able to see this template when they log into Creator Studio.
Using the template
Beth is a developer on Ashiq's team, and in their team meeting learns that a new app template has been created for her team to use inside Creator Studio.
Beth logs into the platform, and opens Creator Studio.
Beth has full access inside Creator Studio, so she creates a new app from the landing screen.
From the template list, Beth sees that the new CS Catalog Team template is available to use with her new app.
Wrap up
I want to thank you for joining me on walking through this scenario to help unpack a common configuration you may face as an admin looking to integrate Creator Studio into your existing application development.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be releasing more blogs, and videos that will give you real life step-by-step methods, scenarios and use cases to help you accelerate your app dev efforts andclear your backlog, by using the power of Creator Studio.
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