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New Documentation: Managing Data

Hi everyone,Today we've released a new topic about managing data. It involves some very intro-level documentation for administrators, as well as more detailed and better organized information about da...

GlideRecord Glimmerings: This or That...

GlideRecord Glimmerings: Windows...

Have you ever needed to write a script that did some work on a lot of records in a table? In such situations it can be very useful to work on one "chunk" of records at a time. There are many reasons w...

Tips and Tricks: Unusual Relationships...

Have you ever wished you could display a related list, but you couldn't figure out how to do it because the things you wanted to list were not related in the usual way (as either a related list or as ...

Find the Bug: Boundary Conditions...

And now for something completely different: a contest! If you click on "Read more" below, you'll see some code that finds prime numbers using the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm. Can you find the bug ...

Tips and Tricks: Practically Recursive...

My post on recursion yesterday left some of you wanting a more, er, practical example. What's a real-world example of where one might choose recursion?Ask and ye shall receive:var filesystem = [{name:...

Updated Documentation: Update Sets

Hi everyone,We've just completed a project to rewrite the Update Sets Documentation. You can find it here:http://wiki.service-now.com/index.php?title=System_Update_Sets_(remote_update_set_support)_Plu...

Tips and Tricks: Recursively Speaking...

What's this "recursion" I keep hearing people talk about? That's a question I got the other day. Recursion is a concept that has (unfairly, I think) gotten a reputation for being difficult to understa...

Tips and Tricks: A Little Abstraction...

Have you found yourself writing almost the same code, over and over again? I recently spoke with someone who had very similar code in several different places, always to get a related list of a CI. Ea...

Tips and Tricks: Sorting Strings Non-Lexicographically...

"All right," said a reader who had read my post of a few days ago on sorting. "Suppose I need to sort something like this mess, the way a human would want it sorted?"May 12, 2009March 3, 10Jan 09, 99d...

Updated Documentation: Web Services

Hi everyone,Our existing Web Services documentation is now available as a single PDF, for reference:http://wiki.service-now.com/index.php?title=Book:Web_ServicesGuy YedwabService-now.com Documentation

Tips and Tricks: Wishing Won't Make It So...

Have you ever wished the designers of a JavaScript class had included a method property you'd really like to have? I sure have. For instance, I've often wished that String class had a "right" and "lef...

Tips and Tricks: More Equal...

What do you suppose will be logged when you run the code below?test(5, '05', 'numeric 5', 'string "05"');test('5', '05', 'string "5"', 'string "05"');test(5, 5, 'numeric 5', 'numeric 5');function test...

Tips and Tricks: Argumentative Functions...

If you've done any programming at all in JavaScript, then you're familiar with functions (I hope!). Normally a function looks something like this nice little message formatting function:var x = say('$...

Tips and Tricks: Those Cloying Closures...

You may sometimes find yourself writing code over and over again with only minor variations. The pattern of these blocks of code (often a function) is the same, but some small particulars may vary. Th...

Belly of the Beast: It's Complementary!

There are times when it's very handy to understand exactly how numbers are represented inside a computer. I'm sure you know that numbers (at least integers) are represented in binary (base 2) form. Bu...

Tips and Tricks: The Wrong Sort...

Have you ever had trouble sorting stuff into the "right" order? JavaScript (and most other languages), by default, sorts numbers into numeric order and everything else into lexicographical (i.e., alph...

Tips and Tricks: Deeply Weird...

Consider this little piece of code:var x = 0.1;var y = 0.2;var z = 0.3;if(z == x + y) gs.log('Of course 0.3 equals 0.3!');else gs.log('What a moronic computer!');What do you think it will print out?Ap...

New Documentation: Spring 2010 Stable 1 Release

Hi everyone,The documentation for the Spring 2010 Stable 1 Release is now available. Release notes are here:http://wiki.service-now.com/index.php?title=Spring_2010_Stable_1_Release_NotesA PDF manual w...

Tips and Tricks: Analyzing Tabular Text...

It's a fairly common challenge when writing Discovery probes or Runbook activities: you've executed some command on a computer, it returns some text in a tabular format, and now you need to analyze it...

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