The h.e.l.p. Blog 3/25/11

[Joe_Employee]

The h.e.l.p. Blog 3/25/11
(here everybody learns plenty)

I had the privilege of introducing our new blog last week and this week I am excited to announce our official title "The h.e.l.p. Bog" (here everybody learns plenty). There were many other titles that put up good fights including "B.O.B." (Beginners Only Blog) but at the end of the day this is not just a blog for us beginners but also a blog for all those seeking knowledge and help/hints/tips about Service-now.com. All of the recent Service-now new hires will soon be the future experts of this product and I want this blog to grow with the community. This week is full of great topics including, changing multiple fields at once, reference qualifiers; specifically generating encoded query strings through a filter (it sounds scary but trust me it's SUPER COOL!). We will share some additional insights from some of our community members.

The first topic seems straight forward enough but when combined with Service-now's incredibly easy ability to sort and filter tables the ability to changes multiple fields at once becomes a valuable feature to use. Keep in mind I am doing this on a Mac so the process might be slightly different on a PC but it should still work. On a Mac once you navigate to table you want (A1), hold down the Shift key and click the first cell you want to select. Once you have selected the cell you want keep holding the Shift key and then press and hold down the Command key and select the rest of the cells you want. It is important to know that when selecting additional cell you can click and drag your pointer to select multiple adjacent cells and/or click cells individually. (On a PC I know holding Shift will allow the section of multiple adjacent cells and holding CNTRL will allow individual selection of cells, I would presume this would hold true for this process) After you have selected all the cells you want to change double click on one of the selected cells and your cell dialogue box will open giving you the option for that cell, it will also indicate how many records will be changed (A2). After you have entered the data you want click the green check mark and your cells should update (A3)! I find this useful if you are adding new fields to an existing table and you want to populate data for the existing entries on that table quickly. You could also use this to quickly reassign work to different employees.

The next topic for this week is reference qualifiers! I have no intention for reinventing the great information that is already available on our Wiki: http://wiki.service-now.com/index.php?title=Reference_Qualifiers
I really just wanted to point out one feature that is briefly covered on that page, generating encoded query strings through a filter. What this boils down to is Service-now gives you the power to take a filter that you have created on any table (B1) and by right clicking the filter breadcrumbs (B2) you get the options to copy query (B3). This will give you the chance to copy that query's code and use it as a reference qualifier! This is incredibly helpful especially if you get stuck trying to figure out the exact properties needed to filter by. The one thing you need to be careful of is sometimes you will get the sys_id as one of the filter criteria, which is fine and is exactly what you need to filter by sometimes, but when using it to code with it maybe difficult for someone else to work with at a later date since it is not a logical value. Feel free to use this for more than just reference qualifiers too; I know those wheels are already turning in some of your heads on what you can use this for!

The last thing I wanted to cover was an 'ah-ha' moment one of our community members had that was also a 'ah-ha' moment for myself. While we all understand the community is a tight nit group of people and often when posting in a forum it's easy to forget that you are still on a public forum. Where this becomes important is when you are posting screen shots, please make sure that you don't have any proprietary information on those screen shots. While it is often extremely helpful to see exactly what you are seeing in order to help solve issues it is also important to keep your company safe. Options are editing the shots to take out sensitive information or even sending private a message to a Service-now employee if they are the one helping you. By no means does this mean you have to censor your post, and for the most part people have test data entered anyways, it's just something to keep in mind. Additionally feel free to use the Demo instance to duplicate your issue since there is nothing on there that would need to be edited out.

I hope that you enjoy this blog and will keep an eye out for future editions. As always please post your own findings or comments here.