What is the best way to have different incident forms for different products?

[adsch]

We are just getting started with ServiceNow and want to have multiple kinds of incident forms for several different products. The products will need very different form fields and form layouts, and different tables.

Should we just use UI policies to change what fields are shown based on a selected category? Would it be best to create separate applications for each product and create something like an incident form in each application? Is there a way to apply separate "views" to the incident form based on what product the ticket is being submitted for?

[Michael Ritchie]

What do you mean by "product"?   If these are CIs or some other attribute on the incident form you can use view rules to set the right view. You can also force a view from an application module in the navigation bar.

[adsch]

Michael, we have a few different software applications that users can submit tickets for. So each form would have different fields for certain aspects of the software product. Also we want a general incident form for issues not related to those products.

The view rules look helpful. I suppose the software application would be chosen from a Category attribute on the form.

Would creating custom applications be a better way to go if we wanted users to be able to easily a) On the homepage, click on the incident form related to a specific software application , and b) View open incidents for each software product? Also for incidents specific to applications stored in different tables?

Apologies for the ignorant questions, still new to this.

[Michael Ritchie]

Thank you for the clarification on the product. To me that sounds like a configuration item so I recommend you create a CI for each product. If these are like applications then use the application class CI. CI relationships show up throughout the platform so there are lots of advantages using it this way especially for reporting, including the queriers you mentioned.

You could create record producers for each product like "Report issue for X product" and then in the script set the CI of the incident to the appropriate CI.   Then you could have a view rule that uses a condition based on the incident CI to show the approprite view.

[bernyalvarado]

Hi Michael, i found these to be great questions! And in fact the right ones to make a good design!

In general terms, approaching your need through UI policies is a really good choice!

Approaching this problem through views may not be the best choice since "views" can get messy really quickly; specially since sometimes a specific "view" could get stick to a table according to the user preference and is often a challenge to enforce having the right view at the right moment.

If the personalization of the form is mostly required at the time of submitting an incident then you could leverage record producers. http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Record_Producer#gsc.tab=0

This video has a great explanation of how you could leverage record producers.

I hope you find this helpful!

Cheers !

Thanks,

Berny