Community Code Snippets - Current Factory

[sabell2012]

NOTE: MY POSTINGS REFLECT MY OWN VIEWS AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF MY EMPLOYER, ACCENTURE.

DIFFICULTY LEVEL: BEGINNER
Assumes good intermediate level knowledge and/or familiarity of Scripting in ServiceNow.

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When testing out new code in either Scheduled Job, Fix Scripts or Scripts - Background I find it difficult to test Business Rules or gs.eventQueue code without having the current object around.   There are a couple of approaches you could take when doing this.  One is only OK, and the other is well...right on!

The OK approach:

var current = {};
current.assigned_to = {};
current.assigned_to.sys_id = "<>";
current.assigned_to.name = "Fred Flintstone";
current.assigned_to.manager = {};
current.assigned_to.manager.sys_id = "<>";
current.assigned_to.manager.name = "Wilma Flintstone";
current.number = 'INC1234567';
current.state = 1;
current.short_description = 'This is a test.';

// ... and so on.

gs.info('--->\nAssigned To Manager: {0}', [current.assigned_to.manager.name]);
gs.info(JSON.stringify(current));

Your result should look like this:

Yuck.   Oh, and did I mention this approach, while interesting, does not create a true GlideRecord object?   It has it's uses.

My favorite approach is to create a current "Factory" that will produce a current object according to my specifications. You could place this Factory into a Function Script Include and call it as needed from your Fix Script or Scripts-Background.

var tableName = 'incident';
var order = {
	type: 'descending',
	field: 'sys_updated'
};
var encodedQuery = ''; // in case there is a constraint needed like: sys_id=...

var current = currentFactory(tableName, order, encodedQuery);

gs.info('--->\Number: {0}\nState: {1}\nShort Description: {2}',
	[current.number,
	current.state.getDisplayValue(),
	current.short_description]);
	
function currentFactory(tableName, order, encodedQuery) {
	var currentRecords = new GlideRecord(tableName);

	if (JSUtil.notNil(encodedQuery)) {
		currentRecords.addEncodedQuery(encodedQuery);
	}

	if (JSUtil.notNil(order)) {
		if (order.type == 'descending') {
			currentRecords.orderByDesc(order.field);
		} else {
			currentRecords.orderBy(order.field);
		}
	}

	currentRecords.setLimit(1); // there is always ONLY one record in current
	currentRecords.query();

	if (currentRecords.hasNext()) {
		currentRecords.next();
	}

	return currentRecords;
}

The new result should look like this:

Anything to make unit testing easier!

Enjoy!

Steven Bell.

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Originally published on: 08-27-2015 08:07 AM

I updated the code and brought the article into alignment with my new formatting standard.