“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work!”
— Thomas Edison
It seemed like a fairly straightforward request. My typical response to these types of queries is, “Sure, I can do that,” without really looking into things to see what it might take or if it is even possible. But seriously, how hard could it be?
On the ServiceNow Incident form, there is an option on a drop-down menu labeled Email:
Clicking on this menu option brings up a form that allows you to compose and send an email to the person who reported the Incident. They liked this feature, but they wanted to expand on the concept. Would it be possible to put a series of check-boxes somewhere across the top to select one or more of Caller, Assignment Group, or Assignee?
Sure, no problem.
As soon as I got back to my computer, I started digging around to find the UI Page or Portal Page behind that form. Unfortunately, there is no UI Page or Portal Page behind that form. From what I can tell, unlike most forms and pages in this tool, this one is an integral part of the product and does not have its parts and pieces housed in the system database. That seemed unfortunate, but then I discovered Email Client Templates. There were some possibilities there, but still not what I was looking for. I ran down a few other promising-looking rabbit holes that all terminated in fairly substantial brick walls at the end, and then decided to step back and taker a broader view of things.
If I couldn’t put the check-boxes on the form itself, what if I created an intermediate form that I could control completely, and then passed the user’s selections to the email form via URL parameters? Basically, all I had to do was find out where the existing menu item led, replace that destination with my own intermediate form, and then have my form do whatever the original menu item did, but with the addition of the user’s choices. Let’s go find that menu definition and grab the current pointer and replace it with a new one … how hard could that be?
Well, as it turns out, that menu is not based on data stored in the system database as far as I can tell. I may have missed it somehow, but I dug around quite a bit and couldn’t find any place where that list of items could be modified in any way. It might be in there somewhere, but I certainly couldn’t find it.
So, maybe I spoke a little too soon when I said that I could do this. Still, there has got to be a way …
