“I can’t do it never yet accomplished anything. I will try has performed miracles.”
— George Burnham
Straight out of the box, the ServiceNow Service Portal comes bundled with a trio of widgets for displaying rows of a table: a primary data table widget and two additional wrapper widgets that provide different means to pass configuration parameters to the primary widget.
One of the wrapper widgets is the Data Table from URL Definition widget, which was almost exactly what I was looking for. The problem, of course, was the almost. I needed something that was exactly what I was looking for. So close, but no cigar. The problem was that it took most, but not all, of the parameters that I wanted pass via the URL. You can pass in the name of the table, the name of the view, a query filter, and a number of other, related options, but you cannot pass in a list of columns that you want to have displayed in the list. There is a property called fields, which is set up for that very purpose, but its value is hard-coded rather than being pulled from the URL.
Well, that won’t work!
Here is the line in question:
data.fields = $sp.getListColumns(data.table, data.view);
Here is what I would like see on that line:
data.fields = $sp.getParameter('fields') || $sp.getListColumns(data.table, data.view);
That really shouldn’t hurt anything at all. All that would do would be to take a quick peek at the URL, and if someone provided a list of fields, then it would use that list; otherwise, it would revert to what it is currently doing right now. It would simply add what I wanted without taking away anything that it is already set up to do. Unfortunately, this particular widget is one of those provided in read-only mode and you are not allowed to modify it, even if you are an admin. Well, isn’t that restrictive!
The recommended course of action in these cases is to make a clone or copy of the protected widget under a new name and then modify that one, leaving the original intact. I thought about doing just that, but I’m not really one to blindly follow the recommended course of action at every turn. I just wanted to make this one small change to this one and leave it at that. Fortunately, there is a way to do just that. First, you have to export the widget to XML.
Next, make whatever modifications that you want to make to the exported XML, being careful not to disturb anything else, and the save the updated XML. Now, go back to the list of widgets and use the hamburger menu on one of the list columns to select Import XML.
Browse for your XML file, upload it, and now the modified widget is back where it belongs with your modification in place. Voila! Easy, peasy. Now, I can get back to doing what I wanted to do with this widget in the first place.
