The h.e.l.p. Blog 4/14/11

[Joe_Employee]

The h.e.l.p. Blog
(here everybody learns plenty)
This week: travel, navigation , and macros!

This week Davida and I have had the great honor of making our first customer visit! We packed up our bags and headed across the country with our fearless leader Carleen. I can now say I have a much better understanding of what each of our customers go through when replacing an existing system with Service-now.com. I must admit it is a great feeling to have the ability to help a company take old programs and procedures and replace them with a system that is more flexible, more powerful and overall more relevant to what they want to accomplish.

Once again the knowledge gained this week has been extensive and Davida and I are quickly becoming Service-now.com experts (o.k. that might be a slight exaggeration but we have come far in a short amount of time!)

The first tip I would like to share is something that came up while working through some incident records and is a great way to help navigate through records. Now as a precursor to this tip I will admit once I went to look for a reference to the "next record arrows" I found a great community blog that already covers this and several other Service-now.com tips. I would encourage you to take a look at it for more helpful tips. (40+ Tips and Tricks for Service-now) Below is a snippet from that blog with the tip I was referring to.

Service-now Tip! Next Record Please!
Click the up arrow and right arrows when looking at a form to navigate to the next record in your list. So, if you're looking at 'Assigned to me,' this allows you to view each without having to return to your list view.



The second learning I would like to share this week and also encourage user to provide feedback/input on is a very nifty module called Syntax Editor Macros. Note: This module is only available if you have the JavaScript Editor Plug-in enabled. Additional information about this plug-in and the Syntax Editor Macros can be found on the Wiki http://wiki.service-now.com/index.php?title=JavaScript_Editor_Plugin#Script_Macros

This is a great tool for quickly generating the outlines of commonly used JavaScript by simply typing a small fragment and activating the macro. Below is one of the examples:

vargr - GlideRecord query example

var gr = new GlideRecord("");
gr.addQuery("name", "value");
gr.query(); if (gr.next()) {  

}

So by simply typing vargr and then pressing the tab key you can quickly give yourself the main structure needed for a GlideRecord query.

One of the most useful pieces of this tool is you can make you own custom macros! So if you have a favorite script that you are running all the time make it a macro and start coding at superhuman speed!

For this week I would love to see how our community can use this tool to make everyone's jobs easier, so please post any helpful macros that you might use or just think would be nice to have. If you have never used this tool before, try it out and tell us know how it helps you.


Thanks for reading, hope to see you next week,

Joe Employee