“Parts is parts.”
— Wendy’s TV commercial
I love making parts. One of the reasons that ServiceNow is such a powerful platform is that it is built on reusable parts, and the platform encourages the development and use of reusable parts. I have known a number of developers who are extraordinary coders that can lay down reliable code at an amazing rate of speed, but no one can code faster than they can pull an existing part down from a shelf. When you build a part in such a way that you can reuse it again in another context, you not only solve your current problem, but you also create the solution for problems that you haven’t even encountered yet. That doesn’t just improve productivity, it also increases reliability. Parts on the shelf are on the shelf because you have used them somewhere before, and if you’ve used them before, then you’ve tested them before, which means that you’ve already gone through the exercise of shaking out all of those initial bugs. Faster and better — it’s a win/win.
When I started my Highcharts experiment, my goal was to create a reusable component for displaying any Highcharts graph. I was able to do that with my Generic Chart widget, but in the process, I also ended up showcasing a number of the other little parts and pieces that have been developing on the Now Platform. For example, when I wanted to add the ability to click on the chart and drill down to the underlying data, I ended up linking to my enhanced Data Table widget. I actually built that to support my configurable content selector, but once created (and tested) and placed on the shelf, it was there to later pull down, dust off, and utilize for other, previously unforeseen purposes.
To make the various selections for the four different parameters used in the workload chart, I ended up using the angular provider that I put together to produce form fields on the Service Portal. I didn’t create that to support the workload chart, but once it was created, there is was on the shelf to pull down and put to use.
I built my dynamic Server Portal breadcrumbs because I really didn’t like the way that the out-of-the-box breadcrumbs widget required you to pre-define the trail of pages displayed by the widget. That philosophy assumes that each of your pages can only be reached through a single path. For someone who likes to build and leverage reusable parts, this just seemed a little too restrictive to me. This was yet another “part” that I had build with my content selector in mind, but which was equally useful once I started linking out from my workload chart. In fact, it was while working with my workload chart that I discovered a flaw in my breadcrumbs widget. That’s another nice thing about working with reusable parts: when you fix a problem, you don’t just fix it for your purposes; you fix it for everyone else who is using it for whatever other purpose. That’s the difference between cloning and reusing. If you clone a part and find a flaw, you fix your copy, but the original and any other clones are unaffected. If you reuse a part and fix a flaw, you fix it for everyone.
That’s why I love making parts.
