ServiceNow Development Handbook - Third Edition

Book excerpt: ServiceNow is a powerful ITSM (IT Service Management) software solution with a massively configurable back-end. One of the greatest benefits of ServiceNow is that it lets you do just about anything you could want to do, to suit the needs of your business. On that same note, one of the most dangerous things about ServiceNow, is that it lets you do just about anything! With such freedom and capacity for customization, comes risk, but that risk is not without great reward, which you can realize with a strong understanding of best-practice. Description The goal of this book is to explore the pitfalls, standards, and best-practices that most ServiceNow ITSM developers either learn the hard way, or never learn at all. These are the things that every developer wishes they knew from day one, and which - once learned - will make you a more effective and efficient developer. This book will teach you how to avoid pitfalls, and empower you with knowledge that will allow you to build much more robust, resilient, powerful, and efficient solutions within the platform. Having an understanding of why a given standard is what it is (and why it's important), will not only make you more likely to adhere to it, but will empower you to apply the logic and underlying concepts behind those standards to other areas of the platform and development. It'll make you a more effective administrator, developer, or architect. That's that spirit in which this compendium was written: Teaching and explaining, not simply listing out a series of arcane edicts under the heading of "best-practice". The ServiceNow Development handbook will serve to boost your knowledge, your confidence, and your career. What to expect The ServiceNow Development Handbook covers a wide range of topics including (but not limited to): Coding guidelines Writing DRY code Pass-by-reference Controlling fields in the client AJAX and asynchronicity When not to code Debugging Naming conventions List and form design Testing Execution paths Impersonation Handling Errors Code documentation Update sets Batching and merging What is (and isn't) tracked Tracking scoped records Performance Query efficiency Nested queries Service portal Widgets and option schema Portal coding best-practices Security Who this book is for Administrators and developers at any level of their ITSM development career would find the information in this handbook useful. However, this is a condensed "developer guide", and not a complete ServiceNow training course. If you are just starting out your ServiceNow development career, consider reading the more beginner-friendly "Learning ServiceNow, Second Edition" (ISBN-13: 978-1788837040) first. You can find Learning ServiceNow at http://lsn.snc.guru/ Note: This book's contents may be updated slightly over time, as new information becomes available. This is to prevent you from having to buy a new edition of this book, every time ServiceNow changes something about how their platform works, or for every minor addition to the contents. You can find details on the changes at http://changelog.snc.guru/. For this reason, we've made it so that if you buy the paperback version, you can get the Kindle version at a drastically reduced price, and can update your Kindle version for free whenever new content is available, by going to http://update.snc.guru/.