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...

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...