Copy a record without inserting

[Beth11]

Here's a question for you all:

Is it possible to copy a record and open it for editing without saving? That is, copy the record, but give the user the opportunity to either edit the record before saving, or opt to not save it with no repercussions.

An example of this might be an incident: we don't want users deleting incidents, but if the copy always saves before the user has a chance to edit it, the new form could set off all kinds of workflows and business rules.

Has anyone else encountered this need? How have you dealt with it?

Thanks for your help!

[Beth11]

I can definitely see the use of this in some cases, like incident. Unfortunately, this form requires a lot of text information. It would probably overwhelm the 2,048 character URL length pretty easily.

[Brad Tilton · Accepted solution]

What if you did something like pass the new incident form the sys_id of the existing incident, then wrote an onload client script that uses an ajax call to look up the original incident and populate the new values? It's pretty involved so it may be better just to go with templates or something else.

[Beth11]

Oh man, that's pretty slick! I had not thought of that. It would certainly satisfy the customer's requirements, even if it's potentially a bit fiddly. I'll see if I can get them to approve on the draft, but if not I will definitely be giving this a try.

Thanks so much for your help. While the requirements may be a little strange, this answer will definitely get me there.  

[Uncle Rob]

The least exotic OOB solution would be to use templates (Creating a Template - ServiceNow Wiki).
But that only really works if the records in question are known to happen a lot.

Are we talking about "once in a while" I get a duplicate on a non-standard issue?   If its non-standard & infrequent, does it justify an exotic solution?

Food for thought.

[Beth11]

That's definitely the right mindset! I didn't expect 'generate and don't save' to be quite so exotic, but each tool has specific ways of working that it's tailored to accommodate.

For now, I think that the draft solution I discussed above is going to do the job. The rest will be user education and coaxing our users over to the servicenow side of the force...