Kid Persona

I just tried out the plugin for PPM Teamspace, and it was pretty neat.  The tech behind it is pretty simple - it clones your current PPM tables and gives them a prefix - like for example tsp1_project_task, and let’s you customize them according to a specific need.  Maybe you need PPM for another department, and their needs would differ too much from the current build?

I would usually just extend these tables myself, but this made it way easier for me.  At the same time it made me think - why does ServiceNow have this just for PPM?  Why not make it generic?  I don’t see why you couldn’t just install this type of plugin and in the installation process say “do it for these tables / this application / this module” - and it cloned everything for you.

A topic you never thought you would ever read anywhere.

I have been thinking about writing this one a good while now.  The quote in the picture above is a point in itself - the man shown is Bruce Lee, maybe the worlds most famous martial artist.  I might mention that man a couple of times in this post, but let me begin with a story about myself.

My work background is in programming, server hosting, databases, networking and security. Besides work, one of my favorite activities has been to practice Kung Fu - to be more specific the art known as Wing Chun Kung Fu - something I started doing in the early 1990s. As I don’t expect people to know anything about “Wing Chun”, let me once again point to the man in the picture who you probably know.  

Bruce Lee

When he started learning martial arts in Hong Kong, he learned Wing Chun. Bruce Lee was not merely an actor with flashy moves - there are documented real fights - where he used Wing Chun to win them all.  (He later founded his own style Jeet Kune Do, which is based on Wing Chun, after moving to the US).

Bruce Lee’s teacher was the late Ip Man.  My lineage is through one of his sons Ip Ching, through his student Sifu Garry McKenzie -> Sifu Frode Strøm. Sifu Frode has since started training with Sifu Wong Hong Chung who is Sifu Wong Shun Leung’s son.  Here is me with Wong Hong Chung after training with him in Hong Kong earlier in 2016.

So what’s the reference between this and ServiceNow?

I pride myself in my knowledge of ServiceNow, as I am humble about the knowledge I lack.  I have a no-nonsense approach where hacks and workarounds are avoided and high quality solutions are the focus.  I avoid long meaningless discussions and have a problem/solution mindset.  I always help out my coworkers when needed, and I am not afraid to ask for help where my own experience is lacking.  My mantra around the office is “Work with what’s out-of-the-box, think outside-the-box where needed”.

In Wing Chun, you punch in a straight line, as it is the quickest way for your fist to reach the face.  Punching has clear goal, you want to hurt someone, preferrably to make them stop attacking you.  My Wing Chun training makes me think pretty much the same way when it comes to ServiceNow.  Your task has a goal, and the best solution is almost never a flurry kick.  

In Wing Chun, you don’t waste time.  The goal is to be quick and effective, and at the same time be economical with your energy.  Practicing this for years in martial arts has made me think the same way about my tasks around the office.  I want to solve my tasks in a quick and effective manner, and not spend too much energy while doing it.  This will benefit the client, my company, and myself.  

Basics!

Maybe the most important thing I have come to understand after practicing Wing Chun for so many years is that with good basics you can understand everything.  In Kung Fu, if you think the basics are boring and you want to go straight for the fancy stuff, you will never EVER master any of it.  After teaching the beginners class for many years at my Wing Chun school I was forced to stick to basics way longer than most other students, and in the process found my advanced techniques to improve alot.  It is only once you understand that everything advanced has basic foundations that you know the value of it.  I find that it is the same way in ServiceNow.  I see alot of ServiceNow admins try to solve things in crazy advanced ways - they want to script everything, cross reference back and forth, even if the solution is already there OOB.  Some times they even get away with it, for the time being at least, only to see the solution crumble some time later.  

The most simple technique in Wing Chun is that very basic straight punch to the face.  If I get a challenge at work I try to straight punch that problem straight on in the face.  A flurry kick won’t do anyone any good.  

(This often results in me replying harshly to people at work to avoid wasting time - I do understand if that’s not always cool.  Sorry about that, co-workers!  I am not the best person but probably not the worst.)

Also, ServiceNow is built on fundamental basic database principles, which means that if you learn and understand how databases work, and how to build and interact with them, you can pretty much work your way around all parts of ServiceNow!  My advice to anyone would be to google “basic database concepts” and pick a good source and learn from it. I promise you you will benefit from it. 

Master Ip Man once said : “Use your martial skill to the good of humanity”.  In the same way, I want to use my ServiceNow skills for the good of my client, my co-workers, and my company - and to better myself in the process.

You read all that, so here’s a video for you

This is from the Ip Man movie from a couple of years back.  What is interesting about this movie is that it is choreographed by Ip Man’s son himself, and that most of the techniques used is real Wing Chun.  Now when the fight starts you can imagine it’s how fast I try to solve problems around the office.

Enjoy!

It’s a pretty normal problem around me - people work for hours in the wrong update set, and then are forced to find a way to place their customizations in the right one.

OOB there are ways to move an entry, for example to go straight to the entry record and use the reference field connecting it to an update set.  The problem occurs when you need to move, say, 40 entries.  It will take some time.

So I made this UI Action:

With this UI Action, it would check which ones you marked in the list of entries, and in turn ask you where you want them moved.  Like so:

After choosing your new update set, the script would simply run through the entries and changing the update set reference.  

Oh dear.

I was going to set up a proof of concept on audio feedback in a ServiceNow instance.  Simple stuff, to for example make a “ding” sound if you missed a mandatory field and so on...  

I only had one audio file on hand, and now ServiceNow BURPS every time you load up an Incident screen.

Since I live in Norway, validating a norwegian social security number is some times necessary.  This following code will do that for you, but will surely only be useful to norwegian programmers.  In any case, here’s how you do it.

I don’t even know where to start on this one.

This is the result after importing an Excel file with CI’s... I tried saving the file in different versions with no luck.  It’s quite weird.

I do get an error when I try to show loaded entries after the loading: An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x14) was found in the element content of the document.

Any clues?

Neat trick here.

By utilizing this script below you can get all functions available on the Class passed.  You can use it in script background for example.

showFunctions(new GlideContextualSecurityManager()); function showFunctions(g) { var array = []; for (func in g) { array.push(func); } array.sort(); for (i=0; i < array.length; i++) { gs.log(array[i]); } }

In this example I am sending in the class GlideContectualSecurityManager, and this lists the following:

*** Script: addMaintToDeveloperAdmin *** Script: addRole *** Script: addRoles *** Script: availableElevatedRoles *** Script: canAccess *** Script: class *** Script: clone *** Script: disableElevatedRole *** Script: elevatedPrivilege *** Script: enableElevatedRole *** Script: equals *** Script: getAvailableElevatedRoles *** Script: getClass *** Script: getQueryHelper *** Script: getRoles *** Script: getScopeProtectingRole *** Script: hasRightsTo *** Script: hasRole *** Script: hasRoleInGroup *** Script: hasRoles *** Script: hasRowReadRules *** Script: hashCode *** Script: isElevatedPrivilege *** Script: isScopeAdmin *** Script: isScopeProtectedRole *** Script: notify *** Script: notifyAll *** Script: queryHelper *** Script: removeRole *** Script: roles *** Script: scopeAdmin *** Script: scopeProtectedRole *** Script: scopeProtectingRole *** Script: sessionDisconnect *** Script: setUser *** Script: tableCreateCallBack *** Script: toString *** Script: user *** Script: wait

This is somewhat useful if you ever want to find out what you can do within a Class and it’s poorly documented.  Here is the list I get when passing in the Class called GlideCollaborationManager:

*** Script: addMemberToGroup *** Script: class *** Script: documentConversations *** Script: equals *** Script: getClass *** Script: getDocumentConversations *** Script: hashCode *** Script: notify *** Script: notifyAll *** Script: removeMemberFromGroup *** Script: sendAttachmentToRecordConversation *** Script: sendSystemMessage *** Script: sendVTBUpdate *** Script: toString *** Script: wait

Pretty cool.

PS: Some Classes have a constructor (like the ones above) ... if one doesn’t, like the GlideappOrderGuide class, you call it like this and it would still work:

showFunctions(GlideappOrderGuide);

Here’s a neat trick.  

There will be cases where you would need to know if the script running in your portal page is running on the CMS or on the new Service Portal system.  Since Service Portal runs in “mobile” mode, there are some functionality which simply won’t work there.  In my case I needed to run two portal pages simultaneously, and to reuse scripts between them.

You can do this:

function onLoad() { if (window) { // CMS code here ] else { // Service Portal code here } }

Simple and nice.

Well this is a strange one.

As an admin (user with admin role) I am not able to get the security_admin role at all, and as such I can not work with ACL’s.  The role is missing in the roles list, so I can not add it to my user.  And since I can not add it to my user I can, of course, not use it to elevate.

Before Helsinki you could grant anyone (yourself) this role as long as you had the admin role.

I thought I could implement a workaround making a new custom role with elevated privileges, but unfortunately the ACL tables are limited for writing with the specific security_admin role!  Bummer.

Since I started working in this instance mid-project I tried figuring out if this was due to mishandling the instance in some way, but I did find a post on a forum where another user had the same problem.  That guy had to reset the instance.  God, I hope I don’t have to do that.

Still investigating - maybe this has a simple explanation.  [edit:  it did.  read on]

EDIT: I couldn’t find this in the ServiceNow docs, but now apparently you can only give the security_admin role to someone if you already have that role AND have elevated your privileges.  Unless you have already elevated privileges, the role security_admin will not show anywhere.

Recently my name and integrity was questioned because of a satire video I posted on this blog (now removed).  It was a tutorial on ServiceNow, but narrated by an american rapper where he used his own slang and curse words, but content wise it was pretty much correct.  Comedy is subjective, and it is obvious that we can’t all like all forms of humor, but there is a very normal technique (also knows as “comedic device”) to take something far away from the standard and place it in a situation where the audience would never expect it. It utilizes the “taboo” comedic device to say something nobody would say (or in a way they would never say it - like a rapper would) in the civilized element (ServiceNow). 

This was that kind of humor. 

Background: The video starts out with the image of a gun background, to emphasize the “gangster” style of narrating the tutorial.  The goal was to take something as corporate and suited-up like ServiceNow and place it in something completely different setting.  The narrator then went on explaining about the ServiceNow user interface, video screen recording an actual instance, but using verbal terms like “this Module s***”, “your b****-a** Role”, and “Incidents are f***** up s***”.  

Funny?  To some.  Childish?  Absolutely.  Provoking?  Apparently so.

No company, client, or real person was in any way mentioned in the video.  My own dev instance was being used.

Then I was suddenly approached asking me to remove the video and this blog as well (remove SN references from it).  I was a bit stunned because it was claimed that I had “violent and child abusive references”, something I had in no way intended to portray.  You could probably say that a picture of a gun, although not being one in use, is a reference to violence - but if you want to debate it you could also argue that it is a reference to an olympic sport.  I know, I know - with the complete setting it is obvious that it wasn’t, but I do believe it is far fetched to conclude it is glamorizing violence - unless you missed the comedic device.  

The mention of child abuse puzzled me for a while until I realized it was not about the video at all - it was about this blog, or to be more exact - the name of it:  Chopped Kid Persona.  [edit: now changed to avoid misunderstandings - but still, read on to understand the background of it]

When you sign up for a tumblr account, and you choose a name already used by someone, tumblr will try to generate one for you.  In my case it auto generated “choppedkidpersona” as username and blog name.  I don’t understand the algorithm behind the name generation tumblr uses, but it seems to pick a few words and randomly put them together:

The “AlwaysBabyCollector” user name I see easily could be offensive to some people.  (From urban dictionary:  “Baby Collector : A term used to describe a woman (or girl) who mothers children for the sole purpose of collecting a larger piece of welfare-system pie.”)

When Tumblr suggested the name choppedkidpersona, my thought was - well, I have a kid persona.  I joke alot.  Wikipedia descripes a persona as:

A persona (plural personae or personas), in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor.

In my mind, the blog was supposed to give me an outlet to describe my learnings in ServiceNow, my frustrations on the path, and to shout out my success on the way.  At the same time, my kid persona allows me to write in a playful manner, to me it is a much easier way to describe things.  People who know me well understands this.  The “chopped” part of the name I thought fitted well with the synonym “hacked”.  My foundation lies in programming, I have been a system developer for many many years - in the original sense of the word I have aspired to be a hacker:

In computing, a hacker is any highly skilled computer expert. (- Wikipedia)

This is not in any way to be confused with the term name controversy.

Using pseudonyms is quite common these days; People ranging from musicians (deadmau5) to actors (Demi Moore) and even famous politicians (Jeb Bush) are not using their real names.

At the same time, I felt that since I was going to use a pseudonym on the blog (although my real name IS mentioned), it creates the impression of a fictional persona, but which represents a real person - this can be philosophized about being similar to having a split personality.  To play with this idea, my persona is split - or chopped.

To conclude, the name Chopped Kid Persona is meant to be understood as it is the kid persona which is chopped, or split.   Not the kid.  And I am the kid.

What have I learned from this?  Well, I have certainly learned I can’t make any joke references in work related matters, even if it’s done in my spare time and not targeting anyone.  I still hope I won’t need to delete the blog, if that’s what it takes to not offend anyone, because it would take a bit of work to move all the material to a new one.  I am not sure if changing name on the blog is even possible.  [edit: it’s possible.  To avoid further misunderstandings, I’ll try to change the name to kidpersona.]

If you in any way feel I am writing anything which offends you, please just contact me directly.  I’ll sort it out as it is not my intention to make anyone feel bad.

Love you! - Anders Real Persona

Tell me the person in this picture doesn’t look like someone you would want to teach you ServiceNow.  Because he might just do that one day.  With that same face in that same dark alley.  

Or more likely in a classroom, and I’ll be wearing a decent shirt.  I promise.

After spending all that time learning and improving my ServiceNow knowledge, implementing and fixing things, I was assessed by ServiceNow and have finally been certified as a trainer.  To begin with I will be able to teach the System Administrator course, and I will be trying to get certified for the scripting course as well because of my vast programming experience.

Pretty excited!

I decided early I wanted to take a bigger part in training others.  Many years ago, as I was taught how to be a programmer, so I desired to pass on knowledge to people around me.  I became skilled in martial arts as well, and started teaching groups in my school.  Even though the type of knowledge was different, I enjoyed it very much.

So, it was just a matter of time before I wanted to look into the possibility of teaching ServiceNow.  I am in no way an expert, and I humbly see years and years ahead of me with gaining further knowledge and experience in the platform.  Even so I do believe I have some strong sides which definitely could benefit others, and I have therefore started my path to become a certified trainer in ServiceNow.

To start, for the ServiceNow System Administrator course.

The things I have had to do has taken longer than I expected.  Filling out forms, skill profile and CV, realizing my company required it all in company letterheads so had to do it all over, waiting for people in the line to pass the documents on to the next, all the waiting ... finally I have come to the next step:

Co-teaching a class.

Now, I have been on stage performing music for thousands of people, I have held talks at big conferences, and I have been teaching groups to punch eachother in the face - but for some reason, standing in front of a group of 12 people seems more difficult in many ways.  First of all it is way more intimate; every single one in class are there because they really need this.  This is something they are required for performing their job.  If I say something wrong today, they will suffer for it tomorrow.  Their manager will suffer for it, and their company will too.  And in the end, it’s bad for the community.  And I -know- this, and it terrifies me.

Luckily I have one brilliant man as main trainer for this course, Peter Ravnholt from BusinessNow (Denmark).  The way this guy talks to the group with superior confidence, great self-awareness of his skillset and experience, and good communication skills - is truly something to look up to.  I hope to one day be able to stand in front of a class the same way as him.

It is the end of day two, with one more to go - and I can already see where I need to work on myself in this setting.  First of all, I have been working too much on “advanced” parts of ServiceNow - hard scripting and integrating other systems to work with ServiceNow, as well as programming on my prototype which uses ServiceNow as a back-end.  All of this makes it very difficult for my brain to NOT talk about the advanced parts which is frankly out of scope for the course.  I have to struggle to not mention what might or could happen once you get passed the basic functionality.  It’s tough to talk about LDAP without mentioning how scripting can improve it.  It’s hard not to talk about Business Rules without showing how powerful you can really make it with scripting.

But I’m working on it.

One more day of this course.  Tomorrow I will be talking about interactions (UI Actions, UI Policy, Data Policy, and Business Rules) as well as ACL.  Hopefully I don’t mess it up and will be allowed to move on to the next step in the process.

Let’s do this.

To deactivate a user in ServiceNow when a user is set to deactivated in AD is not as straight forward as one would think.  ServiceNow wiki suggest you use this code to attain this result:

var disabledFlag = 2; //perform a bitwise comparison on userAccountControl to see if the 2 bit flag is enabled if (current.u_user_account_control & disabledFlag) {  gs.log('Disabling user: ' + current.user_name + 'userAccountControl=' + current.u_user_account_control);  current.active='false';  current.locked_out='true'; }

It expects you to have a new field on the user table called u_user_account_control and the script would be in a “before” Business Rule, with condition  current.u_user_account_control.changes().

If you want to straight up sync with the AD based on a specific logic, it’s another matter entirely.  The reason is how the AD values for a deactivated user looks.  In my transform map script I managed to do it this way:

var deactivationCodes = ['514','546','66050','66082','262658','262690','328194','328226']; var arrayUtil = new ArrayUtil(); target.active = !arrayUtil.contains(deactivationCodes, source.u_useraccountcontrol.toString()); target.locked_out = arrayUtil.contains(deactivationCodes, source.u_useraccountcontrol.toString());

The good thing about this method is 1) You don’t need a new custom field on the user table 2) You only work within the transform map script and don’t need another Business Rule

The range of codes in userAccountControl from AD is vast, and is calculated from a combination of choices in AD.  Here are the ones I bothered to include in my script, just using the ones for disabled account:

AD userAccountControl codes:

Now I can program day and night, discover bugs and fixing them, and in the end I will get you your prototype.  The concept will be proven.

My problem is always the same - to get in some credible content to support my technology.  To show that the service made will work with actual stuff in it.  But I am not in any way good with choosing the right content, be it text, images or videos.  In ServiceNow at least there’s always the Blackberry or ServiceNow employees, or other demo data... but what do you do when you need actual video or images suitable for the product itself?  

Well, you do what every web designer would:   Buy some footage at photo and video stock sites.

I am currently working with a prototype which I am hoping to be able to present very soon.  It is an advanced digital signage solution which uses ServiceNow as backend, including a bunch of useful functionality.  You can see it as a kind of super fancy front end for ServiceNow, and it can be used pretty much for any visual presentation.

The problem for me is that the stock footage available is mostly more stupid than my own ideas.  Example:  if you search videoblocks for “crazy”, you get this “crazy young businessman” here:

This guys is so “crazy”, he tilts his head, smiles, and moves his head from side to side.  Clearly crazy.

I can’t use that, it will make people focus more on the bad footage than on the product I am trying to show.  A client would rather ask me why the guy is behaving in an unnatural way than ask me with what technology I got all of ServiceNow to show with animations, videos and peer to peer messaging.

At the same time, I can’t be bothered with spending my days finding anything better.  In the end I guess I won’t have a choice but working with the standard stock footage everyone else uses, like businessman on the phone, man walking dog, or people serving a delicious gourmet meal, proudly.

Passing a URL parameter is some times practical, and in theory no hard to solve.  You can in client script use some rather simple javascript code to get your URL, and parse your values from there.  For example the line document.url will give you everything.

Unless you are in a record producer, apparently.

I tried grabbing my URL parameter without any luck until I realized I got a different URL than I expected due to the page being loaded in an iFrame.

Solution:   Change out the line  

var url = document.url;

with

var url = document.referrer;

In the end, my script which aimed to automatically set the assignment group field, looks like this:

function onLoad() {     var url = document.referrer;  // this used to be document.url     url = url.substr(url.indexOf('sys_group='));     var assignment_g = url.substr(url.indexOf('=') + 1);     g_form.setValue('assignment_group', unescape(assignment_g));     g_form.setReadonly('assignment_group', true); }

After a long day securing my super complex ACL, restricting data on a whole new level of difficulty, a module listing a table data looks emtpy to most users. The reason for this is that ServiceNow instead of simply removing all list records which are removed by ACL, it leaves the lines out alltogether, and states proudly that 20 lines are removed due to security restrictions.

I don’t see any reason why this should be the default in ServiceNow.  Most end-users won’t even care there’s data hidden from them.  The way it is now, there MIGHT be a line displaying a record on page 72 due to pagination.

It’s simply not user friendly.

I am left with trying to figure out how to also filter the list in the module based on my custom canRead script include, and I can’t figure out how yet.