Legacy - Denoise your source control commits

As a source control developer, you can merge the Git branches, without getting noise from the fields that are auto-updated by the system.

Important:

Starting with the Xanadu release, the legacy version of ServiceNow Studio is being prepared for future deprecation. It will be hidden and no longer activated on new instances but will continue to be supported. For details on the deprecation process, see the Deprecation Process [KB0867184] article in the Now Support Knowledge Base.

Try building and editing apps in the current version of ServiceNow Studio instead. For more information, see Building applications with ServiceNow Studio.

Overview

In Studio, the Source Control feature packages application files as XML payloads, when they are exported to Git repositories. When a user merges Git branches in a Git repository as part of the application development workflow, the user must resolve any conflicts in the XML files. These conflicts are typically in the fields that are system generated, like sys_updated_by, and represent non-user generated changes. The user must be careful when they are resolving conflicts in these fields because this process might create more noise.

Saver Exempt attribute

Features have been added in Source Control to de-noise the XML payloads, to assist the user in resolving the conflicts when the Git branches are merged.

By default, the system sets the saver_exempt attribute for certain fields in tables whose values are auto-generated by the system. For more information on the saver_exempt attribute, see Dictionary attributes.

The following table contains the saver_exempt values.

Table 1. Saver Exempt attribute table

Fields	System Tables	saver_exempt values	Outcome expected
sys_updated_on sys_updated_by sys_mod_count	sys_metadata sys_choice sys_package sys_app_customization sys_claim sys_package_dependency_m2m	exempt_vcs_only	The fields are not written to the corresponding XML representation of a record for the table during the packaging of the application for Git commits.
Sys_id	sys_dictionary sys_documentation sys_choice	exempt_vcs_only	The sys_id field is not written in the XML representation of the record of three tables during the packaging of the application for Git commits.
Fields with loader_exempt=true		exempt_always	The fields that have loader_exempt set to True are not loaded in the instance. They are not written to the XML representation of the records in the tables during the packaging of the application for Git commits

Disabling the tracking property

An admin can disable the glide.source_control.disable_tracking_of_update_fields so that the fields do not display user-generated values.

Note:

The following fields are not written to XML during source control commits, and their values in the instance are loaded from a Git commit. If an admin wants the system to write these fields to XML and use the system-generated values for these fields, the admin can set the property glide.source_control.disable_tracking_of_update_fields to False.

The following fields are the system-generated values that the admin sees:

• sys_updated_by = commit user
• sys_updated_on = commit time
• sys_mod_count = zero

sys_id fields for tables

The sys_id field for tables are saved in the corresponding “dictionary/<tablename>.xml” so that they are not regenerated during the installation in the instance, other than when tables are created. The result is that the noise is reduced from all the XML files that reference the sys_id of the table or represent the sys_db_object record for this table.