Basic understanding of getJournalEntry(-1)

[Tejaswini9]

Hello Guys,

can anyone explain me in simple terms why do we use getJournalEntry(-1).

Thanks,

Teju

[Steven Parker]

This should help:

https://developer.servicenow.com/app.do#!/api_doc?v=newyork&id=SGE-getJournalEntry_N

getJournalEntry(1) Gives you the most recent entry

getJournalEntry(-1) Gives you all entries

We use it to grab last work note or approval rejection comments from time to time.

[Elijah Aromola]

This returns all journal entries. This would be useful if you needed to print, email or send out all the comments/work notes/entries of a journal field.

[Michael Ritchie]

To expand on Steven and Elijah's answer it is important to understand that the comments and worknotes fields on tasks are actually of type journal input which behind the scenes causes the values populated into these types of fields to be stored into a separate table called Journal Entry (sys_journal_field).  The value along with the user and timestamp are stored in that table.  So in order to get the values of these types of fields the getJournalEntry() API was created and as Steven provides you can pass in a parameter to provide the number of historical journal entries to bring back.

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[Allen Andreas]

I don't think you can put in just any number though, right?

Like...I was helping someone else and they just wanted to get the last 3, but they couldn't simply just do:

getJournalEntry(3), right?