Force Commit out-of-the-box "Commit Retrieved Update Set" Flow Action

[Mark Roethof]

Articles, Blogs, Videos, Podcasts, Share projects - Experiences from the field

Hi there,

For years ServiceNow encouraged customers to move away from Update Sets. Yet during one of the keynotes at Knowledge24, it was clearly acknowledged: the vast majority of customers is still using Update Sets and they are not abandoning them anytime soon.

Fast forward a few releases: Out-of-the-box Update Set APIs, Subflows, and Actions. Update Sets are note going anywhere 😀.

While working on creating a custom QA and deploy process for one of my customers, I noticed one quirk on the Commit Remote Update Set API... How to handle Preview Errors?!

Let's share this piece of knowledge with the community.

Out-of-the-box APIs and Subflows

The CICD Namespace already contained a large number of interesting APIs. With Yokohama a new namespace was added: "CICD Update Set".

CICD Update Set

It includes APIs to:
- Back out an update set
- Commit an update set
- Commit multiple update sets in order
- Create an update set
- Preview an update set
- Retrieve an update set

These APIs are well documented.

What ServiceNow hid a bit under the radar... did you know also out-of-the-box Subflows (and Actions) are shipped?

Already reading all these names: All you need to swiftly create a process to automate ServiceNow deployments without creating a custom monster (yes... I have done that before 🙄).

...