Can update sets have duplicate updates?

[will_smith]

When I am working with update sets I am seeing, what appear to be duplicate updates. Please see the example image below. Why are there 2 INSERT_OR_UPDATE catalog variable set changes to "Application.New Contractor Access Request".

Being a newer administrator I struggle to find the minute differences between all of these changes. I know that ServiceNow tracks all changes made, which I appreciate. I am finding that managing update sets and customer updates has proven challenging for me lately. I know it should be as simple as just switching the update set you're working on, but when i get going on a project I sometimes forget to check and apply a number of changes to the wrong update. Or, the other thing I run into is only a partial subset of changes are tracked under the right update set.

Thanks for your time all!

[will_smith]

Let me also add that I have been through ALL of the wiki articles on update sets...

• SN Wiki | System Update Sets
• SN Wiki | Update Sets search
• SN Wiki | Transferring Update Sets
• SN Wiki | Getting Started with Update Sets
• SN Wiki | Update Sets Best Practices
• SN Wiki | Planning the Update Process

[Steve McCarty]

William,

It looks like you made two different changes to the Catalog Variable Set, one on 2/25 and the other on 3/16.   So yes both of those changes will show in the update set.   They will be applied in the order they were created so that you should end up with the same finished product after applying the update set.   Update sets are troublesome at times.   It does seem like a simple thing to change and keep updated, but it can be very difficult at times.

If you haven't looked at identifying projects as "Applications" in ServiceNow, I would recommend it.   Using the idea of applications instead of updates sets in newer releases of ServiceNow has helped with some of the update set problems.   With an update set you apply a cumulative list of changes to the platform, so you see multiple updates to the same item sometimes and can also get unintentional changes to unrelated projects thrown into the middle of your update set.   If changes are part of a different update set that isn't put together in the right order things don't always work quite right.   With applications it stores all the parts of the application together and then moves the finished product to another instance so it isn't as critical that you are always in the right update set, because as long as all the pieces you need for your application are correctly identified as part of your application they will be moved in their final state and not be dependent on all the cumulative updates.   Fuji added scoping for applications so that they don't interfere with each other.   Geneva added some more great tools for identifying all the parts of an application and lets you work on it very easily.

Applications - ServiceNow Wiki

-Steve

[will_smith]

Is there a way to look at the update set payload and see the changes made? I would love to see an asterisk or something that points out what was changed...

[Steve McCarty]

You can go into each of the individual changes and look at the payload XML data and see exactly what values that update is setting.   There is an orange XML button next to the label for the payload that will open the XML information in a new window and format it nicely to make it easier to read.  

You can also export the entire update set to an XML file and look at it that way, but the individual change payloads are contained in CDATA fields so they don't get formatted nicely that way.   I've done that to search to find out if an update set changed a particular field, but I don't use it for much else.

-Steve