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...

Round 'Em Up!

Sometimes you'd rather show "265" on the screen instead of "265.39128376465" — perhaps because it's just easier to understand, or perhaps because the calculation that yielded that very precise looking...

Tips and Tricks: Sets in JavaScript...

Not long ago I came across a piece of code whose purpose was to eliminate the duplicates from a comma-separated list of email addresses. The approach taken was to put the email addresses in an array, ...

Tips and Tricks: Double or Nothing...

Not long ago I helped someone troubleshoot their script, which had the same problem as the sample script below. I'm more than old enough to have a glass of wine, but the script below says I'm to get a...

Tips and Tricks: A Captivating Experience...

The following little snippet of JavaScript uses the replace() method on a string, but in a way you may not be familiar with. What do you think this script will log if you run it?var x = "This is a tes...

Tips and Tricks: Database Case Insensitivity...

Consider the following code snippet. What do you think it will log (assuming that the query succeeded)?var gr = new GlideRecord('core_company');gr.addQuery('name', 'Lenovo');gr.query();if (gr.next()) ...

Phoenix is Hot!

Earlier this month I visited a customer in Phoenix, Arizona. I rented a little red car with a black interior, and made the mistake of leaving the windows rolled up tightly. During the day the temperat...

Help Wanted...

Service-now.com is growing, including our team of Discovery, Runbook Automation, and CMDB developers. If you (or someone you know) are an insanely great Java and JavaScript developer, know your way ar...

A Useful Trick...

Sometimes when you're writing a script, you need to query one table but get results based on fields in another, related table. For example, you might want to query for NICs on Windows servers. The NIC...

Service-now Management Reporting

I'm curious how many customers are at a stage with their implementation where they are able to create dashboards that summarize the health of their business services and infrastructure. Essentially th...

New Documentation: London Certificate Changes

Hi everyone,For those administrators whose instances are in the London datacenter, the SSL certificate expires on July 11, 2010. Information on the change is available here:http://wiki.service-now.com...

Scriptomatic and WMI classes

If you are a Discovery customer interested in writing your own custom Windows probes and sensors, the first step you want to do is often identify the information you're going after. As powerful as the...

Updated Documentation: Content Management

Hi everyone,In conjunction with Mark O'Donnell, our Content Management guru, we've rewritten the Content Management documentation to make the plugin easier to use. Particularly, we focused on writing ...