Service Portal Page Development Best Practice..

[ryanwoodburn]

Hi All

I recently built a quick proof of concept for our service portal, and I have since re-cloned the environment and we are now starting to build our portal.

During the proof of concept, I would take a standard page, copy it, and develop my copied version.   The one issue with this, however, is that certain widgets are set to bring you to certain pages, which are always the standard pages.   At times I struggled to modify these widgets to point to the newly developed page (using a copy of the widget of course).

E.g. a simple list widget points you to a certain record page, which will work perfectly with the breadcrumbs widget.   (I can get this one to point to the correct page, but it's a simple example)

I am considering building our new portal by editing the original pages (saving a copy for rollback), as opposed to editing copies of the original pages.

Does anyone have any recommendations for or against this?

I was also wondering how this would be affected when upgrading / patching - i.e. how likely are the portal pages to be updated, and if I have edited the original will SNow still update the pages?

Any help appreciated!

Thanks

Ryan

[sachin_namjoshi]

Hi Ryan,

Please check below threads which should be helpful for you

Service Portal — ServiceNow Elite

Tutorial: Create a Real Time To Do App using Service Portal & Record Watchers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqfLQxaJozs

Regards,

Sachin

[Tommy Jensen]

In some widgets you define which page it redirects to in widget instance options.So check that before cloning.

[ryanwoodburn]

Thanks

Yes I have managed to workaround for most.

Do either of you know of any reason it would be bad practice to modify the original pages though?

Thanks

[ChrisBurks · Accepted solution]

Hi Ryan,

I'm not so sure if ServiceNow performed updates that it would be directly to the pages. The pages only act as containers. The real update would be to the widgets.

You have to remember that when you place a widget onto a page it not actually the widget that gets rendered but the widget instance that points to the actual widget.

Edit:

One other thing that isn't apparent is that widget instances have an Active flag on them. You can see this by either looking at a list view and pulling that field in or doing a righ-click view xml while viewing a widget instance record. So one way of preserving the oob page is simply setting the Active flag to false and then pulling your custom widget on that page. You'll just have to remember that if you need to see the oob widget work you'll need to go back to the widget instance record and flip the Active flag back on.