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Tips and Tricks: Even More Arguments...

In an earlier post, I touched a bit on the arguments property that's available in any function. There I showed how you can use it to create functions that take a variable number of arguments. Today I'...

Tips and Tricks: Accepting Different Argument Types...

Have you ever written a handy-dandy little script function, and then wished you could have it accept different kinds of arguments? For instance, perhaps you wrote a function that took a list of people...

Tips and Tricks: Function Arguments...

There are occasions when it is quite useful to have a function argument that isn't an actual value (in the usual sense of a number, string, etc.), but rather a way to get a value. There are also occas...

New Documentation: Spring 2010 Stable 2

Hi everybody,Today's release is now officially documented! A nice end to another release cycle. If you want to find out what's coming in Spring 2010 Stable 2 and how it works, here's the release notes...

Belly of the Beast: GUIDs and the sys_id...

If you've done any scripting of Service-now.com, you've almost certainly run into the notion of a sys_id: the unique 32-character long identifier that is the primary key for every record in every tabl...

GlideRecord Glimmerings: Destructive Impulses...

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('$...

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