question Re: How to give access to view table schemas without making user an admin in ServiceNow AI Platform forum

How to give access to view table schemas without making user an admin

TrenaFritsche — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 13:48:27 GMT

Is there a way to give access to Show Schema to non-admins? I tried to create a custom module that lists table names and has the a button to use a UI Action that the Show Schema Map link on the table page uses thinking that I can give certain people the role that this new page has. When I use it, it works fine, but when I impersonate that person who would use it, it displays the page, but does not show any tables. Any thoughts on how to enable a graphic view of the table schema without providing admin access?

Re: How to give access to view table schemas without making user an admin

Dave Smith1 — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 14:04:38 GMT

That's going to be somewhat tricky - generally data schemas contain structural information about the data content and revealing them to unprivileged parties could be violating confidentially policies.

What you're in effect asking is: can someone have a DBA view without giving them DBA access rights?

What would be the reasoning behind this? Do you want to provide read-only views to developers?

Re: How to give access to view table schemas without making user an admin

TrenaFritsche — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 14:11:10 GMT

I am really after giving our ITIL Process Engineers read only access to this so they can just see the schema of the tables.

Re: How to give access to view table schemas without making user an admin

Kalaiarasan Pus — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 14:16:11 GMT

I had investigated on this similar long back and it seemed difficult to get this working properly without admin access.

This might sound a little stupid, but I would instead advise you to take the screenshots of the table schema that people might be interested in and keep them on Sharepoint/any repositories. At-least we don't often add fields very often and it was the easiest next best thing that we settled on.

Re: How to give access to view table schemas without making user an admin

Michael Ritchie — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 14:33:49 GMT

The schema map will be hard to make available. There is a personalize_dictionary role that allows access without full admin, but this role also allows write access so they could add and update fields.

Do they require the schema map view? You could create a read ACL on the sys_dictionary table and allow them to view the attributes of a table. This will be in a list format instead of the hierarchy view.

Re: How to give access to view table schemas without making user an admin

Dave Smith1 — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 15:08:59 GMT

I got the impression they would, so creating a new role then permitting specific granular access using ACLs would be my approach, too.

Re: How to give access to view table schemas without making user an admin

apjohn2 — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 15:54:43 GMT

I just had this question come up for me in my company. An IT Networking manager for some reason decided to get trained up in using Tableau, apparently with the exclusive point to get data out of servicenow into Tableau for reporting reasons. As a result he asked me for access to view all table schema. I'm not about to give him full admin rights, so this was how I solved it:

Logged into our dev instance w/ full admin
Created a new user, which I named 'roadmin' (as in read-only admin)
Added two roles to this user: admin and snc_read_only
In a separate browser, logged into our dev instance as 'roadmin'
Verified I could see everything an admin can see, including all tables, schema, etc., but I could not edit any record on any table, anywhere

More about the snc_read_only role can be found here.

I hope this helps someone. Thank you.

Re: How to give access to view table schemas without making user an admin

Community Alums — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 13:53:27 GMT

Can I ask where you found out that personalize_dictionary allows for this? I can't find anything on the docs site with more details.

Re: How to give access to view table schemas without making user an admin

Michael Ritchie — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 19:45:14 GMT

In these situations I look at the ACLs linked to the records. In the case of sys_dictionary, the personalize_dictionary has read access to those records which are queried when using the Schema Map.