“True prevention is not waiting for bad things to happen, it’s preventing things from happening in the first place.”
— Don McPherson
Some time ago we built some utility functions to support reporting Events within the ServiceNow Platform. That was before the Flow Designer, though, so that effort did not include any support for that environment. We already have the script to do all of the heavy lifting from our earlier work, so it wouldn’t take much to create a Flow Designer Action that called that script to report an Event that occurred during Flow processing. We can call our new Action Log Event, and set up Action Inputs for all of the usual suspects.
For our script step, we will basically set up the same inputs and then source them directly from the primary Action Inputs.
Those of you who are paying attention will notice that we defined the additional_input field as a String even though it needs to be an Object when we make the call to our existing script. The assumption here is that the caller will provide a valid JSON String, and then we can turn it into an Object in our script before we make the call. Here is the script to convert the String and then make the call.
(function execute(inputs, outputs) {
if (inputs.additional_info) {
try {
inputs.additional_info = JSON.parse(inputs.additional_info);
} catch(e) {
//
}
}
var seu = new ServerEventUtil();
seu.logEvent(inputs.source, inputs.resource, inputs.metric_name, inputs.severity, inputs.description, inputs.additional_info);
})(inputs, outputs);
There are no outputs from this process, so this is the entire Action. Once we Save and Publish it, it will be available from the Action selection list, and then we can add Log Event steps anywhere in our Flows and Subflows where we want to report an Event. That was fairly quick, easy, and relatively painless. For those of you would like to try it out on your own, here is an Update Set.
