Month: December 2019

Generic Feedback Widget, Part VI

Posted on | by snhackery

“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”
— George Eliot

Well, it turns out that creating a group was not nearly as challenging as reading a group that already exists. I had already started pulling the code out of the widget proper and stuffing it into my accompanying Script Include, so I went ahead and kept that in there, but it’s pretty vanilla stuff. I also tossed in the code to verify group membership, which is also pretty vanilla stuff, so the resulting collection now includes functions to read the group profile, to create a new group, and to join the group if needed.

var SnhFeedbackUtils = Class.create();
SnhFeedbackUtils.prototype = {
	initialize: function() {
	},

	getGroupID: function(table, sys_id) {
		var groupId = null;

		var grp = new GlideRecord('live_group_profile');
		grp.addQuery('table', table);
		grp.addQuery('document', sys_id);
		grp.query();
		if (grp.next()) {
			groupId = grp.getValue('sys_id');
		}
		if (!groupId) {
			gs.getUser().setPreference('snh.live.group.read.authorization', 'true');
			grp = new GlideRecord('live_group_profile');
			grp.setWorkflow(false);
			grp.addQuery('table', table);
			grp.addQuery('document', sys_id);
			grp.query();
			if (grp.next()) {
				groupId = grp.getValue('sys_id');
			}
			gs.getUser().setPreference('snh.live.group.read.authorization', null);
		}

		return groupId;
	},

	createGroup: function(table, sys_id, name, description) {
		var conv = new GlideRecord('live_group_profile');
		conv.initialize();
		conv.setWorkflow(false);
		conv.document_group = true;
		conv.table = table;
		conv.document = sys_id;
		conv.name = name;
		conv.short_description = description;
		conv.insert();
		return conv.getValue('sys_id');
	},

	ensureGroupMembership: function(groupId, liveProfileId) {
		var mbr = new GlideRecord('live_group_member');
		mbr.addQuery('group', groupId);
		mbr.addQuery('member', liveProfileId);
		mbr.query();
		if (!mbr.next()) {
			mbr.initialize();
			mbr.group = groupId;
			mbr.member = liveProfileId;
			mbr.insert();
		}
	},

	type: 'SnhFeedbackUtils'
};

Originally, I had the code to add the person to the group upon reading the feedback, but it turns out that you don’t really have to be a member of the group to read the feedback, so I decided to pull that out and only add the person to the group if they left feedback of their own. This keeps people out of the group who were just looking, and limits the membership of the group to just those folks who have participated in the discussion. The final version of the server side script now looks like this:

(function() {
	var feedbackUtils = new SnhFeedbackUtils();
	data.feedback = [];
	data.mention = '';
	if (input && input.comment) {
		data.table = input.table;
		data.sys_id = input.sys_id;
		data.convId  = input.convId;
		data.tableLabel = input.tableLabel;
		data.recordLabel = input.recordLabel;
		data.recordDesc = input.recordDesc;
		data.mentionMap  = input.mentionMap;
		postComment(input.comment);
	} else {
		if (input) {
			data.table = input.table;
			data.sys_id = input.sys_id;
		} else {
			data.table = $sp.getParameter('table');
			data.sys_id = $sp.getParameter('sys_id');
		}
		if (data.table && data.sys_id) {
			var gr = new GlideRecord(data.table);
			if (gr.isValid()) {
				if (gr.get(data.sys_id)) {
					data.tableLabel = gr.getLabel();
					data.recordLabel = gr.getDisplayValue();
					data.recordDesc = gr.getDisplayValue('short_description');
					data.convId = feedbackUtils.getGroupID(data.table, data.sys_id);
					if (data.convId) {
						var fb = new GlideRecord('live_message');
						fb.addQuery('group', data.convId);
						fb.orderByDesc('sys_created_on');
						fb.query();
						while(fb.next()) {
							var feedback = {};
							feedback.userSysId = getUserSysId(fb.getValue('profile'));
							feedback.userName = fb.getDisplayValue('profile');
							feedback.dateTime = getTimeAgo(new GlideDateTime(fb.getValue('sys_created_on')));
							feedback.comment = formatMentions(fb.getDisplayValue('message'));
							data.feedback.push(feedback);
						}
					}
				} else {
					data.invalidRecord = true;
					data.tableLabel = gr.getLabel();
					data.recordLabel = '';
				}
			} else {
				data.invalidTable = true;
				data.tableLabel = data.table;
				data.recordLabel = '';
			}
		} else {
			data.invalidTable = true;
			data.tableLabel = '';
			data.recordLabel = '';
		}
	}

	function postComment(comment) {
		if (!data.convId) {
			data.convId = feedbackUtils.createGroup(data.table, data.sys_id, data.recordLabel. data.recordDesc);
		}
		comment = comment.trim();
		comment = expandMentions(comment, data.mentionMap['comment']);
		var liveProfileId = getProfileSysId(gs.getUserID());
		var fb = new GlideRecord('live_message');
		fb.initialize();
		fb.group = data.convId;
		fb.profile = liveProfileId;
		fb.message = comment;
		fb.insert();
		feedbackUtils.ensureGroupMembership(data.convId, liveProfileId);
	}

	function expandMentions(entryText, mentionIDMap) {
		return entryText.replace(/@\[(.+?)\]/gi, function (mention) {
			var response = mention;
			var mentionedName = mention.substring(2, mention.length - 1);
			if (mentionIDMap[mentionedName]) {
				var liveProfileId = getProfileSysId(mentionIDMap[mentionedName]);
				if (liveProfileId) {
					response = "@[" + liveProfileId + ":" + mentionedName + "]";
				}
			}
			return response;
		});
	}

	function formatMentions(text) {
		if (!text) {
			text = '';
		}
		var regexMentionParts = /[\w\d\s/']+/gi;
		text = text.replace(/@\[[\w\d\s]+:[\w\d\s/']+\]/gi, function (mention) {
			var response = mention;
			var mentionParts = mention.match(regexMentionParts);
			if (mentionParts.length === 2) {
				var liveProfileId = mentionParts[0];
				var name = mentionParts[1];
				response = '<a href="?id=user_profile&table=sys_user&sys_id=';
				response += getUserSysId(liveProfileId);
				response += '">@';
				response += name;
				response += '</a>';
			}
			return response;
		});
		return text.replace('\n', '<br/>');
	}

	function getUserSysId(liveProfileId) {
		if (!data.userSysIdMap) {
			data.userSysIdMap = {};
		}
		if (!data.userSysIdMap[liveProfileId]) {
			fetchUserSysId(liveProfileId);
		}
		return data.userSysIdMap[liveProfileId];
	}

	function fetchUserSysId(liveProfileId) {
		if (!data.profileSysIdMap) {
			data.profileSysIdMap = {};
		}
		var lp = new GlideRecord('live_profile');
		if (lp.get(liveProfileId)) {
			var userSysId = lp.getValue('document');
			data.userSysIdMap[liveProfileId] = userSysId;
			data.profileSysIdMap[userSysId] = liveProfileId;
		}
	}

	function getProfileSysId(userSysId) {
		if (!data.profileSysIdMap) {
			data.profileSysIdMap = {};
		}
		if (!data.profileSysIdMap[userSysId]) {
			fetchProfileSysId(userSysId);
		}
		return data.profileSysIdMap[userSysId];
	}

	function fetchProfileSysId(userSysId) {
		if (!data.userSysIdMap) {
			data.userSysIdMap = {};
		}
		var lp = new GlideRecord('live_profile');
		lp.addQuery('document', userSysId);
		lp.query();
		if (lp.next()) {
			var liveProfileId = lp.getValue('sys_id');
			data.userSysIdMap[liveProfileId] = userSysId;
			data.profileSysIdMap[userSysId] = liveProfileId;
		}
	}
	
	function getTimeAgo(glidedatetime) {
		var response = '';
		if (glidedatetime) {
			var timeago = new GlideTimeAgo();
			response = timeago.format(glidedatetime);
		}
		return response;
	}
})();

With this latest version, anyone can now view the feedback, and anyone can post feedback. If you are the first person to post feedback on a particular item, then a new group gets created, and anyone who posts gets added to the group. Using the Live Feed infrastructure rather than creating my own tables may end up having some unforeseen adverse consequences, but for now, everything seems to have worked out as I had intended, so I’m calling it good enough. If you want to check it out yourself, here is the latest Update Set.

Generic Feedback Widget, Part V

Posted on | by snhackery

“If at first you don’t succeed, you are running about average.”
— M.H. Alderson

I looked at several different ways to solve my problem with the Generic Feedback Widget, but I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t involve inactivating or altering the ACL that was at the heart of the issue.Finally, I settled on a plan that would at least involve minimally invasive alterations to the ACL. The plan was pretty simple: create an obscure User Preference and set it to true just before accessing the live_group_profile record, and then delete the preference as soon as the record was obtained. The alteration to the ACL, then, would be to check for that preference before applying the ACL. The updated version of the ACL script now looked like this:

if (gs.getPreference('snh.live.group.read.authorization') == 'true') {
	answer = true;
} else {
	var gr = new GlideRecord('live_group_member');
	gr.addQuery('member', GlideappLiveProfile().getID());
	gr.addQuery('group', current.sys_id);
	gr.addQuery('state', 'admin').addOrCondition('state', 'active');
	gr.query();
	answer = gr.next();
}

The first thing that we do is check for the preference, and if it’s there, then we bypass the original code; otherwise, things proceed as they always have. I don’t really like tinkering with stock components if I can avoid it, mainly because of the subsequent issues with patches and upgrades potentially skipping an upgrade of anything that you have touched. Still, this one seemed to be unavoidable if I wanted to salvage the original intent and still do what I wanted to do.

The next thing that I needed to do was to set the preference just before attempting the read operation, and then removing it as soon as I was done. That code turned out to look like this:

gs.getUser().setPreference('snh.live.group.read.authorization', 'true');
grp = new GlideRecord('live_group_profile');
grp.addQuery('table', table);
grp.addQuery('document', sys_id);
grp.query();
if (grp.next()) {
	groupId = grp.getValue('sys_id');
}
gs.getUser().setPreference('snh.live.group.read.authorization', null);

I ended up pulling that out of the widget and putting it into its own Script Include, mainly to tuck the specialized code away and out of sight. Anyway, it all sounded like a great plan and all I needed to do now was to test it out, so I did. And it failed. So much for my great plan.

It took a little digging, but I finally figured out that the ACL was not the only thing keeping people from outside the group from reading the group profile record. There are also a number of Business Rules that do pretty much the same thing. I spent a little time combing through all of those looking for ways to hack around them, and then finally decided that, for my purposes anyway, I really didn’t to be running any Business Rules at all. So I added one more line to my read script to turn off all of the Business Rules.

gs.getUser().setPreference('snh.live.group.read.authorization', 'true');
grp = new GlideRecord('live_group_profile');
grp.setWorkflow(false);
grp.addQuery('table', table);
grp.addQuery('document', sys_id);
grp.query();
if (grp.next()) {
	groupId = grp.getValue('sys_id');
}
gs.getUser().setPreference('snh.live.group.read.authorization', null);

That did it. Now, people who are not in the group can still read the group profile record, which is good, because you need the sys_id of that record to read all of the messages in the group, which is what we are using as feedback. The only thing that I have accommodated at this point is situations where a group profile record does not exist at all, and I have to create one.

But that’s an entirely different adventure …

Generic Feedback Widget, Part IV

Posted on | by snhackery

“For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.'”
— John Greenleaf Whittier

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, I was pretty proud of my Generic Feedback Widget once I had it pretty much all put together. I even felt so good about it that I went ahead and put out an Update Set. Then I started playing around with it while using other User accounts that did not have the admin role, and I realized that something was seriously wrong. In fact, nothing really worked at all. If you are not an admin or an existing member of a conversation, not only can you not enter any new feedback; you can’t even see the existing feedback that is already there. That’s not right!

It took be a little digging around to finally lay my hands on the source of the problem, but I found it. There is read ACL on the live_group_profile table that includes the following script:

var gr = new GlideRecord('live_group_member');
gr.addQuery('member', GlideappLiveProfile().getID());
gr.addQuery('group', current.sys_id);
gr.addQuery('state', 'admin').addOrCondition('state', 'active');
gr.query();
answer = gr.next();

The impact of that ACL is that you cannot read a record from the live_group_profile table unless you are an existing member of that group. Without access to the group profile, you cannot obtain the sys_id of the group to use in the query of the live_feed_message table to see all of the messages. And you cannot put yourself in the group if you can’t get the ID of the group to include on the live_group_member record you would need to create in order to make yourself a member. The bottom line to all of that is that, if you are not an admin (which overrides this ACL), you cannot see any messages related to the subject of the page and you cannot create any. That pretty much kills the entire basis of what I was trying to do.

The question now, is what, if anything, can be done about it. Obviously, I could simply deactivate that ACL and the problem would be solved, but that would also open up all kinds of other problems that that ACL was designed to avoid, so that’s not really a viable option. I could give up on my desire to leverage these existing tables and functions and just set up all new tables for this process with their own ACLs, but that seems like quite a bit more work than I normally care to undertake. Still, it seems as though there has got to be a way to leverage what I have already built without breaking things that are already in the product and not signing up for a major project. I need to figure out a way for non group members to read the group record without effectively killing that ACL for other purposes, or I am going to have to start all over with custom tables of my own design.

This should be interesting …

Generic Feedback Widget, Part III

Posted on | by snhackery

“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”
— Henry Ford

Last time, I cleaned up all of the loose odds and ends of the display portion of the Generic Feedback Widget, which should have wrapped up that portion of the project. I say “should have” because now that I have it all working I see that there are a couple more things that I would like to do. For one, I think that there should be a limit on the number of entries initially displayed with an option to show them all. Once you accumulate a certain amount of feedback, no one is really going to want to go through all of that, so I think the initial limit should be something like 5 or 10 entries, with the rest only appearing if requested.

Another thing that I noticed in looking at some existing sample data is that the live_message text can contain hashtags, and there should be some code included that formats those hashtags. Of course, that would mean that there would have to be some place to go if you clicked on a hashtag, which sounds like an entirely different project. I’m not really up for that just yet, so I decided to push all of those thoughts aside and get back to the main purpose of this little widget, which is to collect new feedback.

Since the live_message table that I am using to store this feedback supports @mentions, I decided to use the snh-form-field tag that supports @mentions as the input element. This makes the HTML for the form field pretty simple.

<form ng-show="data.showComment" id="form1" name="form1" novalidate>
  <snh-form-field snh-model="c.data.comment" snh-name="comment" snh-type="mention" snh-label="Leave a comment:"/>
  <button class="btn btn-primary" ng-click="postComment();">Post Comment</button>
</form>

In order to use the snh-form-field tags, you also need to add the snhFormField Angular Provider down at the bottom of the widget, but that’s just a matter of selecting that tab and clicking on the Edit button.

One other thing that you need to do with the @mentions is to expand those to include the sys_id before writing them to the database. Here again we will have the sys_user sys_id in the mentionMap, but what we really need for the live_message text is the live_profile sys_id. For that, we will go back to our earlier functions to translate one to the other.

function expandMentions(entryText, mentionIDMap) {
	return entryText.replace(/@\[(.+?)\]/gi, function (mention) {
		var response = mention;
		var mentionedName = mention.substring(2, mention.length - 1);
		if (mentionIDMap[mentionedName]) {
			var liveProfileId = getProfileSysId(mentionIDMap[mentionedName]);
			if (liveProfileId) {
				response = "@[" + liveProfileId + ":" + mentionedName + "]";
			}
		}
		return response;
	});
}

To save the feedback, we need the conversation, the author, and the expanded message. The conversation is the live_group_profile record that points to the table and sys_id to which this feedback is attached. If there were any existing comments, then this record already exists. If not, then we will have to create it using the table and sys_id. The author is the currently authenticated user, but again, we have that person’s sys_user sys_id, when what we really need is the live_profile sys_id. For that we will have to go back to our sys_id translators once again. All together, the code ended up looking like this:

function postComment(comment) {
	if (!data.convId) {
		var conv = new GlideRecord('live_group_profile');
		conv.initialize();
		conv.table = data.table;
		conv.document = data.sys_id;
		conv.insert();
		data.convId = conv.getValue('sys_id');
	}
	comment = comment.trim();
	comment = expandMentions(comment, data.mentionMap['comment']);
	var liveProfileId = getProfileSysId(gs.getUserID());
	var fb = new GlideRecord('live_message');
	fb.initialize();
	fb.group = data.convId;
	fb.profile = liveProfileId;
	fb.message = comment;
	fb.insert();
}

You can also mark the message public or private, and I have thought about providing an option at the widget level to let you configure instances one way or another, but for this initial version, we will just take the default. At this point, all that is left is to take it out for a spin …

Posting a new feedback comment with an @mention

Clicking on the Post Comment button saves the feedback and then reloads the page.

New feedback comment posted.

I like it! Now, this little sample page only contains the Dynamic Breadcrumbs Widget and the new Generic Feedback Widget, but in the real world this new feedback widget would just be a secondary widget on a page with the main attraction displayed in a primary widget. This widget could be placed underneath or in a sidebar, but it really isn’t intended to be the main focus of a page. But then again, how you want to use it is clearly up to you. There are still a few things that I would like to do before I consider this one all finished up, but there is enough here now to release an Update Set for any of you who are interested in playing along at home. The next one will be better, but this version does work.

Generic Feedback Widget, Part II

Posted on | by snhackery

“Slow and steady wins the race.”
— Aesop

Yesterday, we made a bit of progress on my Generic Feedback Widget concept, but we left with quite a few loose ends that needed tidying up. I wasn’t too happy with the way that the date fields came out, so I went sniffing around for an out-of-the-box date formatter and came across the GlideTimeAgo object. This cool little doodad will not only format the date and time, but for relatively recent values, will turn it into a text describing just how long ago it was. To put it to use, I adapted a function that I discovered on another page and threw it down into the bottom of the widget’s server side code.

function getTimeAgo(glidedatetime) {
	var response = '';
	if (glidedatetime) {
		var timeago = new GlideTimeAgo();
		response = timeago.format(glidedatetime);
	}
	return response;
}

Then I updated the code that pulled the value out of the record.

feedback.dateTime = getTimeAgo(new GlideDateTime(fb.getValue('sys_created_on')));

Now recent comments will have timestamps such as 7 minutes ago or Just Now or 4 days ago. I like that much better.

Another issue was the need to translate live_profile sys_ids into sys_user sys_ids. I actually found that I needed to translate from one to the other in both directions, so I set up a couple of maps to retain anything that I found (so I wouldn’t have to look it up again if I needed to translate it again or go back the other direction). I ended up creating four different functions related to this process, one to pull from the map and another to populate the map for each of the two different ways this could be approached (live_profile to sys_user and sys_user to live_profile).

function getUserSysId(liveProfileId) {
	if (!data.userSysIdMap) {
		data.userSysIdMap = {};
	}
	if (!data.userSysIdMap[liveProfileId]) {
		fetchUserSysId(liveProfileId);
	}
	return data.userSysIdMap[liveProfileId];
}

function fetchUserSysId(liveProfileId) {
	if (!data.profileSysIdMap) {
		data.profileSysIdMap = {};
	}
	var lp = new GlideRecord('live_profile');
	if (lp.get(liveProfileId)) {
		var userSysId = lp.getValue('document');
		data.userSysIdMap[liveProfileId] = userSysId;
		data.profileSysIdMap[userSysId] = liveProfileId;
	}
}

function getProfileSysId(userSysId) {
	if (!data.profileSysIdMap) {
		data.profileSysIdMap = {};
	}
	if (!data.profileSysIdMap[userSysId]) {
		fetchProfileSysId(userSysId);
	}
	return data.profileSysIdMap[userSysId];
}

function fetchProfileSysId(userSysId) {
	if (!data.userSysIdMap) {
		data.userSysIdMap = {};
	}
	var lp = new GlideRecord('live_profile');
	lp.addQuery('document', userSysId);
	lp.query();
	if (lp.next()) {
		var liveProfileId = lp.getValue('sys_id');
		data.userSysIdMap[liveProfileId] = userSysId;
		data.profileSysIdMap[userSysId] = liveProfileId;
	}
}

To fix the sys_id references in the comment author link, I leveraged one of the above functions to swap out the live_profile id with the one that I needed from the sys_user table.

feedback.userSysId = getUserSysId(fb.getValue('profile'));

I also utilized those functions formatting the @mentions that can be present in live_message text. I wanted those to be links to the User Profile page as well, so I hunted down some existing code that formats @mentions on the Live Feed page and adapted it for my own purpose.

function formatMentions(text) {
	if (!text) {
		text = '';
	}
	var regexMentionParts = /[\w\d\s/\']+/gi;
	text = text.replace(/@\[[\w\d\s]+:[\w\d\s/\']+\]/gi, function (mention) {
		var response = mention;
		var mentionParts = mention.match(regexMentionParts);
		if (mentionParts.length === 2) {
			var liveProfileId = mentionParts[0];
			var name = mentionParts[1];
			response = '<a href="?id=user_profile&table=sys_user&sys_id=';
			response += getUserSysId(liveProfileId);
			response += '">@';
			response += name;
			response += '</a>';
		}
		return response;
	});
	return text.replace('\n', '<br/>');
}

Most of that is regex gobbledygook that I couldn’t possibly understand, but it does work, so now any @mentions in the text of message are converted into links to the User Profile page of the person mentioned. As with the other corrections, I just needed to modify the code that populates the feedback object to make use of this new function.

feedback.comment = formatMentions(fb.getDisplayValue('message'));

Well, we didn’t get to the part where we take in new feedback, so we will have to take that up next time out. Still, we did make quite a few improvements in the way that the existing feedback is formatted, so we are making progress.

Generic Feedback Widget

Posted on | by snhackery

“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
— Ken Blanchard

The other day when I was testing out my Static Monthly Calendar I needed a page to demonstrate the modal pop-up, so I grabbed a page that I had created to show off my feedback form field. That got me to thinking that I would be nice to have a universal widget to not only collect new feedback on an item, but to also display all of the feedback that had been collected so far. This is something that ServiceNow already does quite well for Knowledge documents, but that isn’t really universal, and can’t be applied to any other component. Still, it’s a nice model, and one that I wanted to emulate in a way that could be applied to other things.

Typical feedback section of a Knowledge document

Previous comments are listed in reverse chronological order followed by an input form where you can enter new comments. This would be the layout of my proposed widget, with the intent that you could use it for any type of entity, and not just Knowledge. I looked at the underlying table structure for this feature, and the data is eventually stored in two places, a Knowledge table called kb_feedback, and the Live Feed table, live_message. After looking into both, I decided that I could accomplish what I had in mind with the live_message table alone, so I cracked open a shiny new widget that I called generic_feedback and got to work.

I like to solve one problem at a time and then move on to the next one, so I started out with the basic structure of the HTML for the widget, basically copying the original from the Knowledge page:

<div ng-repeat="item in data.feedback">
  <div class="snc-kb-comment-by" style="margin-top: 10px;">
    <img src="/images/icons/feedback.gifx" alt="Feedback" aria-label="Feedback">
    <span class="snc-kb-comment-by-title">
      Posted by <a class="snc-kb-comment-by-user" href="?id=user_profile&table=sys_user&sys_id={{item.userSysId}}">{{item.userName}}</a>
      <span class="snc-kb-comment-by-title">{{item.dateTime}}</span>
    </span>
  </div>
  <div>
    <span class="snc-kb-comment-by-text" ng-bind-html="item.comment"></span>
  </div>
</div>

My only significant deviation from the original was to make the name of the person leaving the comment a link to that person’s User profile page. Other than that, it pretty much followed the original layout.

Based on my data references, I was going to need an array of objects with userSysId, userName, dateTime, and comment properties. These values would all come from the live_message table, but first I needed to figure out how to select the specific messages for the particular item that was the subject of the page. One of the properties of the live_message table is labeled Conversation, and is a reference to another table, live_group_profile. The live_group_profile table contains two properties, table and document, that we can leverage to point to a specific record on a specific table, linking our feedback to pretty much anything in the ServiceNow database. Using this approach, to find all of the feedback for a particular entity, you need the name of the table and the sys_id of the record, and with that information, you can find the live_group_profile record that identifies the “conversation” about that entity. On the server side, that code looks something like this:

var conv = new GlideRecord('live_group_profile');
conv.addQuery('table', data.table);
conv.addQuery('document', data.sys_id);
conv.query();
if (conv.next()) {
	data.convId = conv.getValue('sys_id');
	var fb = new GlideRecord('live_message');
	fb.addQuery('group', data.convId);
	fb.orderByDesc('sys_created_on');
	fb.query();
	while(fb.next()) {
		var feedback = {};
		feedback.userSysId = fb.getValue('profile');
		feedback.userName = fb.getDisplayValue('profile');
		feedback.dateTime = fb.getValue('sys_created_on');
		feedback.comment = fb.getDisplayValue('message');
		data.feedback.push(feedback);
	}
}

Before we can gather up all of the feedback, though, we have to establish the name of the table and the sys_id of the record. For the purpose of this particular widget, we will require that this information be passed in the form of URL parameters. These are the very same URL parameters that drive the Dynamic Service Portal Breadcrumbs (which I also included on the page), and are pretty much a standard in the Service Portal, so that shouldn’t be too onerous of a requirement. The code to pull those values in from the URL and validate them looks like this:

if (input) {
	data.table = input.table;
	data.sys_id = input.sys_id;
} else {
	data.table = $sp.getParameter('table');
	data.sys_id = $sp.getParameter('sys_id');
}
if (data.table && data.sys_id) {
	var gr = new GlideRecord(data.table);
	if (gr.isValid()) {
		if (gr.get(data.sys_id)) {
			data.tableLabel = gr.getLabel();
			data.recordLabel = gr.getDisplayValue();
			...
		}
	}
}

This doesn’t give us a way to enter new feedback, but we have enough now to give things a try, so let’s create a page, drag our new widget onto the page, and see how things are looking so far.

First test of feedback layout using existing Change Record comments

Well, overall it didn’t turn out too bad, but I can see right away a number of things that need a little work. For one, I don’t really like the date format. That definitely needs some improvement. Also, my links don’t work for the User Profile page. That’s because the profile column in the live_message table contains the sys_id of the live_profile record, not the sys_user record. That’s not going to work. It’s always something!

Still, I like the way things are shaping up. Next time out, let’s see if we can’t clean up all of those pesky little issues and then work on capturing new comments and posting them back to the database.