I'm Forrest Falk, a ServiceNow Certified Master Architect (CMA). This is a post in a series where I share practical insights from a CMA’s perspective and show how to build a custom skill that you can trigger with a UI Action. If you want to view the previous post in this series or the series on how to create the skill itself, please check out the links below. Feel free to comment below with any questions or suggestions.
Previous post in this series:
How to Trigger a Custom Now Assist Skill via UI Action - Part 1
Previous series creating a custom Now Assist Skill:
Creating a Custom Skill with Now Assist Skill Kit - Part 1
Last time we left off with creating the UI Action for our skill, let's pickup from there. We now will want to publish our skill so that we can use it. Go to All -> Admin Center -> Now Assist Admin.
You should now see the Now Assist Admin homepage. Click the “Now Assist Skills” tab at the top.
We have placed the skill in the “Other” workflow. Click “Other” on the menu on the left side. Note if you selected a different Workflow in the deployment settings of the skill, you will have to search for your custom skill under that workflow.
Now click the “Available” tab to see what skills are available since ours is not active yet. Under our “Set Incident Category” skill, click “Active Skill”.
First it will ask you if you want to limit the skill to any roles. I am going to leave it “Any authenticated user” for mine, but it may normally be limited to ITIL users. Click “Save and continue” to move on.
Now it will ask you how you want it to display. For our skill we only had it selected for a UI Action, so it will give us an option of Core UI. If we had selected Now Assist Panel or other options it would show up here too. Click “Save and continue”.
Review the summary and if all looks good, click “Active” to active the skill.
Now let’s create a test incident to try out our new skill. Now go to All -> Incident -> Create New to create a new test incident.
Fill out the short description, description, and any other mandatory fields on the incident (ex. Caller). I selected my previous test ticket around Photoshop to hopefully get a software result which would be different from the testing I previously did.
In the top right of my Incident form, I see a “Set Incident Category” button. If you do not see this on the form, check the roles on the skill and within Now Assist Admin, check that the skill is activated in Now Assist Panel, check that the UI Action is activated, and check that the condition in the UI Action is what you want (defaults to skills and active status on Now Assist Admin). Click the “Set Incident Category” button and you should see the output appear.
Success it worked! Join me in part 3 below to continue working on triggering our custom skill via UI action. Next, we will work on displaying the output in a better format and testing the UI Action.
Continue to part 3 here: Coming soon!
