“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”
— Albert Einstein
Last time, we came to a fork in the road, not knowing whether it would be better to jump into the My Webhooks Service Portal widget, or to start working out the details of the process that actually POSTs the Webhooks. At this point, I am thinking that the My Webhooks widget will end up being a fairly simple clone of my old My Delegates widget, so that may not be all that interesting. POSTing the Webhooks, on the other hand, does sound like it might be rather challenging, so let’s start there.
When I first considered attempting this, my main question was whether it would be better to handle this operation in a Business Rule or by building something out in the Flow Designer. After doing a little experimenting with each, I later came to realize that the best alternative involved a little bit of both. In a Business Rule, you have access to both the current and previous values of every field in the record; that information is not available in the Flow Designer. In fact, it’s not available in a Business Rule, either, if you attempt to run it async. But if you don’t run it async, then you are holding everything up on the browser while you wait for everything to get posted. That’s not very good, either. What I ultimately decided to do was to start out with a Business Rule running before the update, gather up all of the needed current and previous values, and then pass them to a Subflow, which runs async in the background.
My first attempt was to just pass the current and previous objects straight into my Subflow, but that failed miserably. Apparently, when you pass a GlideRecord into a Subflow, you are just passing a reference, not the entire record, and then when the Subflow starts up, it uses that reference to fetch the data from the database. That’s not the data that I wanted, though. I want the data as it was before the database was updated. I had to take a different route with that part of it, but the basic rule remained the same.
The rule is attached to the Incident table, runs on both Insert and Update, and is triggered whenever there is a change to any of the following fields: State, Assignment Group, Assigned to, Work notes, or Additional comments.
To get around my GlideRecord issue, I wound up creating two objects, one for current and one for previous, which I populated with data that I pulled out of the original GlideRecords. When I passed those two objects to my Subflow, everything was there so that I could do what I wanted to do. Populating the objects turned out to be quite a bit of code, so rather than put that all in my Business Rule, I created a function in my Script Include called buildSubflowInputs and I passed it current and previous as arguments. That simplified the Business Rule script quite a bit.
(function executeRule(current, previous) {
var wru = new WebhookRegistryUtils();
sn_fd.FlowAPI.startSubflow('Webhook_Poster', wru.buildSubflowInputs(current, previous));
})(current, previous);
In the Script Include, things got a lot more complicated. Since I was going to be turning both the current and previous GlideRecords into objects, I thought it would be helpful to create a function that did that, which I could call once for each. That function would pull out the values for the Sys ID, Number, State, Caller, Assignment group, and Assigned to fields and return an object populated with those values.
getIncidentValues: function(incidentGR) {
var values = {};
values.sys_id = incidentGR.getValue('sys_id');
values.number = incidentGR.getDisplayValue('number');
if (!incidentGR.short_description.nil()) {
values.short_description = incidentGR.getDisplayValue('short_description');
}
if (!incidentGR.state.nil()) {
values.state = incidentGR.getDisplayValue('state');
}
if (!incidentGR.caller_id.nil()) {
values.caller = incidentGR.getDisplayValue('caller_id');
values.caller_id = incidentGR.getValue('caller_id');
}
if (!incidentGR.assignment_group.nil()) {
values.assignment_group = incidentGR.getDisplayValue('assignment_group');
values.assignment_group_id = incidentGR.getValue('assignment_group');
}
if (!incidentGR.assigned_to.nil()) {
values.assigned_to = incidentGR.getDisplayValue('assigned_to');
values.assigned_to_id = incidentGR.getValue('assigned_to');
}
return values;
},
Since my Business Rule could be fired by either an Update or an Insert, I had to allow for the possibility that there was no previous GlideRecord. I could arbitrarily call the above function for current, but I needed to check to make sure that there actually was a previous before making that call. I also wanted to add some additional data to the current object, including the name of the person making the changes. The field sys_updated_by contains the username of that person, so to get the actual name I had to use that in a query of the sys_user table to access that data.
buildSubflowInputs: function(currentGR, previousGR) {
var inputs = {};
inputs.current = this.getIncidentValues(currentGR);
if (currentGR.isNewRecord()) {
inputs.previous = {};
} else {
inputs.previous = this.getIncidentValues(previousGR);
}
inputs.current.operator = currentGR.getDisplayValue('sys_updated_by');
var userGR = new GlideRecord('sys_user');
if (userGR.get('user_name', inputs.current.operator)) {
inputs.current.operator = userGR.getDisplayValue('name');
}
return inputs;
},
One other thing that I wanted to track was any new comments or work_notes, and that turned out to be the most the most complicated code of all. If you try the normal getValue or getDisplayValue methods on any of these Journal Fields, you end up with all of the comments ever made. I just wanted the last one. I had to do a little searching around to find it, but there is a function called getJournalEntry that you can use on these fields, and if you pass it a 1 as an argument, it will return the most recent entry. However, it is not just the entry; it is also a collection of metadata about the entry, which I did not want either. To get rid of that, I had to find the first line feed and then pick off all of the text that followed that. Putting all of that together, you end up with the following code:
if (!currentGR.comments.nil()) {
var c = currentGR.comments.getJournalEntry(1);
inputs.current.comments = c.substring(c.indexOf('\n') + 1);
}
if (!currentGR.work_notes.nil()) {
var w = currentGR.work_notes.getJournalEntry(1);
inputs.current.work_notes = w.substring(w.indexOf('\n') + 1);
}
That’s pretty much all that there is to the new Business Rule and the needed additions to the Script Include. Now we need to start tackling the Subflow that will actually take these current and previous objects and do something with them. That’s a bit much to jump into at this point, so we’ll wrap things up here for now and save all of that for our next time out.
