Scoped Apps Limitations - are there any known no-goes?

Tom Sienkiewicz
Mega Sage

Hi All,

From my company's expereince as well as multiple discussions in the community, I know that there are many limitations to using those. On the other hand, the scoped API is constantly being expanded.

So I was wondering if there could be an easy way to say 'let's do a scoped app' or 'nah, better stick to global'? Like a list of issues/requirements - if you get many of those, you should steer away from scope? Have you run into any brickwalls when building a scoped app? I mean, not only a scoped app that should be published on store, but ANY type of scoped app...

From our experience I would list difficulties when working with (some might be outdated though):

  • Attachments (specifically, attachment api and operations on attachment table)
  • Import sets (similarly, issues with extending, operating on import sets)
  • Scheduled jobs (SNCTriggerSynchronizer.executeNow() function not being accessible from scope - big problem to e.g. automatically process excel files being uploaded)
  • Using core script includes

EDIT: Also we find the release process quite difficult to be honest. Once we move the app to production as an update set, there is no way to perform maintenance or do fixes and continue developing other areas at the same time, as fixes can only be promoted to production as new release of application (which would then also have all the unfinished new stuff). So either only move to production once at the end of the project (there goes agile approach), or do further development as another app (not good either). Maybe anyone has a good solution to those issues as well?

5 REPLIES 5

Hi Tomasz,



Here are few links where you can check the list of API's which are not available in Scoped applications



Scoped System API - ServiceNow Wiki


Scoped applications and missing api's


ServiceNow Cart API in Scoped Application


apis for scoped app


Scoped GlideUser API Reference - ServiceNow Wiki


Scoped Application API Requests (Jakarta Release)



Here is an amazing blog of using the utilities instead of API's in scoped applications


Using utilities in Scoped Applications to replace inaccessible APIs