Author: Ahmed Drar

I started this blog to share some thoughts, ideas, and opinions around things I love like ServiceNow, Development, and sometimes birds. ** Any views expressed on this blog are entirely my own. **

The Software Architect Elevator – Book Notes

The new world doesn’t reward architects who draw diagrams while sitting in the ivory tower. It has a lot in store, though, for hands-on innvovation drivers and change agents

Gregor Hohpe

I just completed Gregor Hohpe’s book The Software Architect Elevator: Redefining the Architect role. I did enjoy the book, it’s a great read. I would strongly advise anyone interested in system architecture to pick up this book.

Here are eight lessons I learn from Gregor Hohpe’s book:

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Understanding and using inheritance in Script include

A few days ago I saw a question on the ServiceNow community about how inheritance works in a script include so I thought to write a short article about that.

In Script include we can write a function or we can create a class. In JavaScript, class is an object, an object can access properties and functions from another object, this we call Inheritance

Inheritance is a great way to create a parent/child hierarchy of classes. A good use case for inheritance is when you wish to indicate that one object is mostly similar to another, but with some variations.

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Understanding platform security part 2

In this article, we continue exploring ServiceNow platform Security. have a look at part one if you missed it.

Every organization wants to ensure that their data is inaccessible for unauthorized users..even if unauthorized users gain access to data, they won’t be able to read it, that is where encryption becomes very important.

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How to generate Assessment using AssessmentCreation API?

In some scenarios, we want to be able to generate on-demand assessments, that can be Service Portal or UI Action or Business rule

ServiceNow AssessmentCreation API provides a way to generate assessments via script. In the article, I am using createAssessments method to generate assessments via Service Portal Widget

first here is a quick explanation of the method parameter

AssessmentCreation.createAssessments (String typeID, // Assessment Metric Type Sys ID
 String sourceRecordID, // Assessable Record which will be the source of assessment
String userID // users ID to which to send assessment instances to
)
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Two HRSD Features that I am happy to see them go in Rome

Bulk Case creation scheduled job was completely disabled in Rome and has been replaced by Create bulk HR cases script action which is triggered by sn_hr_core.process_bulk_case_request event. The script runs asynchronously and you don’t have to worry about setting up the right time for the job

Employee Relation COE (sn_hr_core_case_relations) is no longer available, instead new customers are going to use sn_hr_er_case table which is sets in Human Resources Scoped App: Employee Relations [com.sn_hr_employee_relations] not in Human Resources: Core App. New Employee Relation provides a data model that supports tighter security and saves tons of work that usually spends on customization ACL or data segregations

Understanding Semaphore

like many ServiceNow pros, Semaphore comes to mind when there is a performance issue, however, Semaphore is much bigger than that. here I am trying to learn more about Semaphore.

What is Semaphore?
according to ServiceNow docs and JVM docs, Semaphore manages and protects ServiceNow resources and limits the number of activities for a specific resource. Semaphore does that by controlling transaction queues in a first-in-first-out fashion(FIFO).

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Naming Variables and Functions

We all come across situation where we have to look at a code that it’s written by someone else and try to figure out what is that variable does or what is this function suppose to do.

This is where good naming is important. it saves us time and significantly reduce error. I know naming variables and functions can be tricky. In this post, I share two characteristics that can be a foundation or starting point for good naming

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What does ServiceNow Architect do?

When I started my ServiceNow career back in 2013 there were mainly three technical roles:

  • System Admin
  • App Developer
  • Implementation Specialist

maybe those roles were enough at the time, however as the platform continues to grow ServiceNow introduced Architect certificate and also we now see a great emphasis on the architect role

so, What does actually ServiceNow Architect suppose to do ?

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