Should I extend a table or just add fields to it?

[carlh]

Hi All, I have a Best Practice question.

On our "Application" incidents, there is information that would be helpful in resolving an incident.   I have been asked to create many fields and see that my incident form is HUGE and has so many UI Policies.

I'm hoping to be advised on whether it makes sense to add these fields or create new tables.

Real Example:   on an Incident for a mobile app, we'd want to know if they are logged in, Device Type, mobile platform, Network Connection, Member barcode etc....for reporting services, also under applications, we require a few fields such as Report link, User ID, and Report link location...

All of these can easily be added to the Incident table but is there a recommended way to do this?   Should I be adding tables to reference?

Please let me know your thoughts.

Thank you,

Carl Helber

[Chuck Tomasi]

Hi Carl,

Is this truly an incident or a different process piling on the incident table? That's my first question - if it's a new process, consider extending task (or possibly incident.)

Best practice is to extend a table if the table offers many of the same fields and functionality that you need.   Try to avoid using lots of UI policies and consider using a view (and perhaps a view rule to explicitly go to that view.)

There's lots of good information in here:

Reference:

ServiceNow Wiki: Technical Best Practices

[carlh]

Thanks Chuck.

This is truly an incident. We get calls from club personnel and people in the field having issues with a mobile app we built. All those troubleshooting fields they want added would assist in resolving the incident.

I have considered views but haven't yet figured out how to do it by category or CI on incident form.

Another thought I had is to make form sections. In SharePoint it was easy to make a section hide or appear based on another fields value or "permissions" but it doesn't seem as easy in ServiceNow to do that. When I started in Express, hiding a section wasn't possible so we went down this path of tons of UI policies and now as I'm adding I'm a bit stuck.

Do you have any info on hiding a section or something on views that doesn't require scripting? Or, if it requires a script like hiding a section, could you give an example?

Example: Category changes to Hardware, and fields related to hardware troubleshooting would appear, OR, the "Hardware" section or Tab would appear.

In that example hiding a form section sounds great…espescially if I am able to have UI Policies to guide them through the form.

Fill out this field and if it = X, show this section and require these fields….

Seems simple but in reading it's not so far.

Thanks again for looking!

[darius_koohmare]

Hi Carl,

Hope all is well.

Views is the best approach. In Express you didn't have 'view rules', but in Enterprise you have 'view rules' that let you define views based off fields on the form, such as category.

More info here:

Create a view

Create a view rule

Administer views