Email on record being updated in a table

[ChrisLawer]

Hello, 

I have a custom table that when a record is updated I need to send out an email to a group of people. I was able to setup a quick flow designer flow that does that, and sends the information, however, it's so ugly in the output that it is almost non-readable. Is there a better way of getting the data I need to look nice? Flow designer isn't really helpful in this regard.  I can see there are fields associated with it in the designer but I can't select them. Kind of pointless having non useable fields show up. Should I be doing this through a script instead? Anyone have an example script?

 

[Michael George]

I would suggest using a notification and email script (https://developer.servicenow.com/dev.do#!/learn/learning-plans/utah/new_to_servicenow/app_store_lear...) for this rather than the send email action. If you want to initiate it from a flow, that's fine, you can register an even and the trigger the event.

That said, the reason this is unreadable is because you put in the whole record in the email. You would be better off putting in the fields you are interested in. Depending on your use case, you might want to skip listing changes at all and just give a link to the record and rely on the activity stream to highlight changes there. Still, don't drag in the entire record data pill, just drag in single property data pills.

[ChrisLawer]

Thanks for the reply.  I did try pulling the field values from the data pill directly, but they are greyed out and won't allow me to use them. The data that we get from the tool looks similar to this:

[ {
"current_display_value" : "Step 2:  ",
"current_value" : "Step 2: ",
"field_name" : "u_status",
"previous_display_value" : "Step 1:",
"previous_value" : "Step 1: "
} ]

So the data shows up in the email, but is not the most readable.  I think you are right that it would probably be better to just link to the updated record. 

[Community Alums]

Hi @ChrisLawer ,

As the trigger condition is simple, you can easily achieve it using a business rule and notification with almost no code capability. You can refer to the following: Setup email notification using Business rule.

Please mark it as helpful and accept it as a solution if it assists you in any way.

regards,

Prasad