What is FunOnNow?
Now everyone would agree when I say ServiceNow is a fun platform to work on. And as a ServiceNow Developer, I get a chance to solve some real world problems on a daily basis. However, restricting it to only business problems seems like a waste of its capabilities. Since, the platform allows easy integrations, we can extend its capabilities and have some fun while doing it. So, FunOnNow is nothing but an attempt to share a few fun pet projects that I have been trying lately with you all.
So, with that out of the way, let's get started.
Presentations on ServiceNow
Why? you'd ask. Why not use PowerPoint, Google Slides or a fancy alternative Prezi to create slides? These are heavily used softwares for presentations and with a lot of support available. That is absolutely true, but I am a developer at heart. Give me a challenging problem and I'd spend hours on end solving it or spend nights awake debugging an issue in code. But, tell me to create a presentation, and my brain throws an exception
brain.present() is not a functionSo, the desire to not create typical presentations and an urge to code brought me to some alternatives, Webslides.tv, a chief among them. Their homepage says this in one sentence
"WebSlides makes HTML presentations easy. Just the essentials and using lovely CSS."
It really intrigued me and I started exploring that library further. More I read about it, more I liked it as an alternative. Some points that really nudged me towards using it are:
- It is Fun to use
- It has pre-built components
- Easy to use different background images, videos and even gifs
- CSS and HTML5 Support
- Did I mention, It is Fun?
Not yet fully convinced? How about viewing above pointers as slides?
Does that interest you? Well, in that case, follow along to see how you could configure your instance to start using this brilliant library.
Configuration:
First of all, download the source code from the GIT Repo. (If you're downloading it directly as a zip, extract the folder on your local). We are interested in the 'static' folder inside the repo, so open that up, we'll come back to it in a while.
There are a couple of ways in which we can start using the library
1. UI Page
- We can use the direct UI Page to write our HTML.
2. Portal
- We can use Service Portal and create a widget that will store our HTML.
For this example we will use the Portal approach. But, using the UI Page wouldn't differ too much either.
So, before we jump into the Webslides details, let's create a dependency first. Go to Service Portal --> Dependencies and create a new record, I'm going to name it "Webslides.tv".
Once saved, you would see two related lists viz. "JS Includes" and "CSS Includes".
First let's add the javascript file. We need to go back to the "static" folder from the Repo. Open the "js" folder (\webslides-latest\static\js) and copy the code written inside "webslides.js" file.
Come back to ServiceNow instance and in the "JS Includes" related list and click on New. Let's name it "webslides.js". Click on UI Script magnifier and click on "New" in the pop-up.
Mention "webslides.js" as API name, keep UI Type as "All" and paste the copied javascript code. Click on "Submit" twice. We're halfway there.
Next step would be to copy the basic CSS. In the downloaded repo go to the "CSS" folder inside "static" (\webslides-latest\static\css) and copy the styles written in "webslides.css" file.
Back to ServiceNow dependency, click on "New" in the "CSS Includes" related list. We add a name "Webslides" and as we did earlier, we click on magnifier icon on Style Sheet and add a new Style Sheet by clicking on "New" in the pop-up. Let's name this "Webslides.css" and paste the content we've copied from the local folder. Submit twice. We're done setting up the dependency. Hurraay!!!!
We've done a lot of set-up today. We'll cover the Webslides details in the next part. However, if you don't want to wait and get started immediately, use the update set below that will get you started.
