Introduction
Some features, despite of existing for a long time are not well-known after all, and this seems one of them, so here is an article that may help people reduce their workload when publishing modifications to a store app. I am a big fan of highlighting features that many people still don’t know about it, and that is what this article is about. From this blog article onwards I will start a series of posts (whose name will start with "OldButGold") that will highlight features that may not have attracted a lot of attention but are a great way for developers to save time and reduce issues.
Context
It is well known that “Update sets” can cause problems in terms of collisions or even containing records for a different app by mistake, especially when several developers are working on the same application. For such reason, some releases ago ServiceNow released a feature that allows developers to publish customisations to an application as if it was part of the application.
In this way, we will have two app versions, the source version coming from the App Store and the version of the app that contains our customisations.
Applying customisations to a Store app can be as simple as installing a regular app if this feature is used.
How to track the customisations for a given application?
The first thing we need to do is opening the application record and click on “Publish Customisations To My App Repo” related link at the bottom.
This will open a popup window that will show the standard info for the app as read-only, but will give us two extra fields. The “Customized Version” field will allow us to track the version of our customisations, and the “Dev Notes” will contain the release notes (what has changed since the last version).
Once we click on “Submit”, the version will be published and will be available in any other instance under the same account.
If you would like to know how to apply these customisations to another instance, you can find more information in this other blog article I have published: OldButGold #2: Applying application customisations to instances following the best practices
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