Why are some Service Portal widgets read only? Impact on upgrades?

[Nia McCash]

Why are some Service Portal widgets read only?  

I ask this because I am concerned about updates/upgrades in the future.   As we are working with Service Portal, I'm finding that I need to make modifications to many of the widgets to suit our organization/environment.   Some of the modifications are fairly minor.   For example, we don't want to show the priority of tickets to our end users so I modified this one line in the Ticket Fields widget:

When it comes time to upgrade, I would love to be able to use the updated code by ServiceNow for my widgets but as it stands, it's a manual process to compare the old code (with my modifications) with the new code.

Other ServiceNow components (eg. Business Rules) allow you to modify the out-of-box (OOB) functionality.   When there is an update, the skipped records log shows the update and a very helpful diff comparison of the record including any script code so you know what was changed.   Why does Service Portal widgets not work the same way?

Am I missing some critical step in my Service Portal development process that would make upgrades easier?   For example, should I be doing all Service Portal development work in a separate application scope and track using git?   Would appreciate any insight on this matter.

[Bryce Fraser1]

Hi Nia,

I believe the recommended process here is to Clone the widget you're looking to modify and then make changes to the Clone.

This way, your changes won't be overwritten come upgrade time.

[Nia McCash]

Hi Bryce,

My concern is not that my changes will be overwritten. In fact, ServiceNow design forces me to clone the widget; I have no choice in the matter, as far as I know of.   But this means that come upgrade time, I have to compare the difference manually between my code and ServiceNow's updated code OOB.

[antin_s · Accepted solution]

I agree with you, Nia. But on the other hand, most (if not all) of the customers would modify these widgets for their need and upgrade can't update anything. Releasing new widget in upgrades is also not scalable. Widgets are little different from other platform files as multiple files/scripts construct one widget and change in any script makes the widget 'customized' and not easily upgradable.

Hope this helps. Mark the answer as correct/helpful based on impact.

Thanks

Antin

[Nia McCash]

Thanks Antin.   Would love to see more resources from ServiceNow on best practices and how-tos with regards to managing and upgrading the Service Portal customizations.