“Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.”
— Burt Rutan
Now that we have put together a basic ServiceNow Event utility and added a few enhancements, it’s time to try it out and see what happens. There are actually two reasons that we would want to do this: 1) to verify that the code performs as intended, and 2) to see what happens to these reported Events once they are generated. We will want to test both the server side process and the client side process, so we will want a simple tool that will allow us to invoke both. One way to do that would be with a basic UI Page that contains a few input fields for Event data and a couple of buttons, one to report the Event via the server side function and another to report the Event using the client side function.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s just collect the description value from the user input and hard code all of the rest of the values. We could provide more options for input fields, but we’re just testing here, so this will be good enough to prove that everything works. We can always add more later. But for now, maybe just something like this:
The first thing that we will need is some HTML to lay out the page:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<j:jelly trim="false" xmlns:j="jelly:core" xmlns:g="glide" xmlns:j2="null" xmlns:g2="null">
<script src="client_event_util.jsdbx"></script>
<div>
<g:ui_form>
<h4>Event Tester</h4>
<label for="description">Enter some text for the Event details:</label>
<textarea id="description" name="description" class="form-control"></textarea>
<div style="text-align: center; padding: 10px;">
<input class="btn" name="submit" type="submit" value="Client Side Test" onclick="clientSideTest();"/>
<input class="btn" name="submit" type="submit" value="Server Side Test"/>
</div>
</g:ui_form>
</div>
</j:jelly>
There’s really nothing too special here; just a single textarea and a couple of submit buttons, one for the client side and one for the server side. On the client side button we add an onclick attribute so that we can run the client side script. On the server side button, we just let the form submit to the server, and then run the server side script when we get to the other side. The client side script is similarly very simple stuff:
function clientSideTest() {
ClientEventUtil.logEvent('event_tester', 'None', 'Client Event Test', 3, document.getElementById('description').value);
alert('Event generated via Client Side function');
}
… as is the server side script:
if (submit == "Server Side Test") {
new ServerEventUtil().logEvent('event_tester', 'None', 'Server Event Test', 3, description);
gs.addInfoMessage('Event generated via Server Side function');
}
Now all we have to do is hit that Try It button on the UI page, enter some description text, and then click one of the submit buttons to see what happens. On the client side:
… and on the server side:
Now that we have generated the Events, we can verify that they were created by going into the Event Management section of the menu and selecting the All Events option. By inspecting the individual Events, you can also see that each Event triggered an Alert, and by setting up Alert Management Rules, these Alerts could drive subsequent actions such as creating an Incident or initiating some automated recovery activity. But now we are getting into the whole Event Management subsystem, which is way outside of the scope of this discussion. My only intent here was to demonstrate that your ServiceNow components can easily leverage the Event Management infrastructure built into the ServiceNow platform, and in fact, do it quite easily once you created a few simple utility modules to handle all of the heavy lifting. Hopefully, that objective has been achieved.
Just in case anyone might be interested in playing around with this code, I bundled the two scripts and the test page together into an Update Set.
