My Active items widget - adding Change requests to Activity configurations and My Requests page

[Michal Sadowski]

Hi EC superheroes,

I have a very reasonable requirement from my stakeholders to consolidate all important task types into My activities Items widget. One important task type that will require additional configuration is Change requests. The idea is to add Change requests to the widget as below using Activity configurations:

The expected behavior when users click this on homepage is to 1) take them to My requests page 2) that is filtered to active Change requests.

1) No problem with this part. This I achieved by configuring Activity configuration AND My request filter for Change requests

2) This is where the set-up fails. How do I make sure the activity configuration a) counts active change requests in My active items widget, b) when clicked, it takes the user to My Requests page filtered to active Change requests only?

Any help appreciated. My preference, if possible, is to stay with OOB My active items widget and OOB My Requests page and only add configuration settings.

[Dan O Connor · Accepted solution]

@Michal Sadowski Not sure if you got this sorted, but figured it might be useful for anyone that drops by on the thread

Widget Count

The counts on the widget are controlled through a Script Include called ActivityConfigurationUtilSNC. This shouldn't ever have to be changed, as it's passing through what's setup in the Activity Configuration, which you've done 🙂 

Just to note, the count will only ever show up to '9+'. Anything less than 10 has a digit, anything 10 or more shows 9+.

The Activity Filter Configuration is where we control what ultimately is going to appear in the Count, as that is returning filtered records.

In your example above, your filter is going to return All Active Change Requests. So that is likely always going to be 9+. As the idea behind the widget is to show the user their work, it's generally a good idea to narrow this down to applicable stuff to the user.

So for example you might add into the filter there Change Requests assigned to the user, or Opened by the user.

Page direction

You can see in the Activity Configuration setup, there is a record to define what page the user will be directed to. This passes into the widget through that script mentioned above for when someone clicks on the count tile.  So in your example when someone clicks the Change part of the widget, it will open My Requests.

My Requests is not configured (to my knowledge) for Change, so there is two options here I see

a) You will need to edit and customize the My Requests widget to include Change Requests

b) You will need to create a new page for Change, that includes for example, a Simple List widget to return the records (worth remembering to just configure any list widget as you have as per your filters)

Personally I would probably suggest option b. In the event Change ever becomes baseline to the widget or the My Requests page, it would be just deactivating the Change page as opposed to having to reconfigure the My Requests page and widget again. 

[Sandeep C]

Hello Dan, 
Any changes to the count section of "ActivityConfigurationUtilSNC" will cause performance issue? Because if it is no then ServiceNow would have been implemented this instead of keeping it as 9?

[Dan O Connor]

Don't think making a change will cause performance issues. Most of the performance issues I see in Employee Center are customers making customisations that bring no real value, or being excessive with the data volume being passed into some widgets. 

I'd also imagine this widget script include has changed recently as the widget itself underwent a significant (and for the better) design change 

[Simran321]

@Dan O Connor - My active tasks widget is showing annual goal update tasks. How do I remove this? These tasks seems to be OOB