How to Develop Custom Highcharts Reports

Darrion Burges1
Mega Expert

Hello Reporting team, 

 

I am part of a large organization that utilizes both reporting and PA for as many levels of reporting as possible. We do everything we can using the self-service report builder and have made sure to create processes around self-service report creation/sharing. 

 

However, my team needs to specifically deal with leadership reporting, and we are increasingly finding ourselves running into the edge of reporting's capabilities. We already use a dashboard workflow to share our reports, and we want to give a consistent look and feel for our users that are already used to the traditional ServiceNow Reports. 

 

I know that ServiceNow Reporting uses highcharts, and that highcharts has a javascript extension as well. Is there anything special to know about using highcharts in ServiceNow? is there some sort of custom extension for ServiceNow Reports we can use in our scripts? or is it simply that we need to buy the highcharts extension and simply implement it directly in servicenow? 

 

The ultimate vision, is the creation of dashboards that have normal reports, and custom highcharts reports side-by-side. Ultimately, we are trying to expand our repertoire of reporting tools in ServiceNow and I wanted to check with the experts if there are any best-practice implementation methods that can be advised before we simply dig into the process of implementing the highcharts plugin directly into servicenow. 

 

As always, thank you for your time and expertise!

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Adam Stout
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

There was a session on custom visualizations (using but not limited to HighCharts) at K19.  I would recommend reviewing that:  https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_article&sys_id=40562f5cdb9d3b0422e0fb2439961...

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Download the example application and look at the Lab Guide for working examples.  There is a fair amount of work to do to get everything to work on a dashboard with other widgets and listen to interactive filters.

The Highcharts library is already on the instance, so you just have to include it in your UI page.  A different package would require a little more work (but I have seen examples with people using d3).

You may want to look at the ServiceNow store as well.  There are some third party apps that sit on your ServiceNow instance but give you more control in terms of visual appearance for reporting compared to standard reporting.  That may be a better long term solution depending on your needs since it is supported by someone (even if it is not ServiceNow).