“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
— Charles Darwin
Last time, we introduced the idea of building a simple little app to manage Service Accounts. Today, we are going to jump into the App Engine Studio and see if we can throw something together using that tool. To be completely honest, I have been more than a little resistant to try doing anything with that tool since it first came out, mainly because I am quite comfortable with (and quite productive) doing things the way that I always have, and quite frankly, I never really understood the benefit. Still, it’s what all of the cool kids are doing these days, so what the heck … let’s give it a shot.
To begin, let’s click on that big Let’s Go button on the initial splash screen, and then click on the Create App button up in the top corner of the App Engine Studio home page.
On this initial app creation screen we can enter the name of our app, a brief description, and upload an image that we snagged from someone else’s web side. Then we can hit that Continue button and see what comes next.
The default roles that were generated by the process seem to be sufficient for now, so let’s just click that Continue button again and see what’s next.
At this point, it looks like it has enough information to actually create the artifacts for the app, so we will watch this screen for a bit before it automatically jumps into the next page.
At this point, we are done with the initial app creation, so the only thing left to is to click on the Go to app dashboard button to continue working on developing the app.
From here, it looks like we can do all kinds of things, but the first thing that we need to do is to create our tables, so let’s click on the Add link next to the word Data.
This brings up a couple of choices, and since we don’t have any data to import, we want to select the first option and create a new table.
There is not much to do here on this screen, so we will just click o the Begin button to continue.
Now we are presented with a few options, but again we have no external source for our data and the entire thing will be net new, so let’s select the Create from scratch option and Continue.
Now we are at a point where we can name our new table and set up the auto numbering for our records. The first table that we want to build is the master table of accounts, so we will call it Service Account, and give it a number prefix of SA. Once we complete the form, we can click on the Continue button to proceed.
This gets us to the permissions settings, and for now, let’s give all permissions to everyone, and then click on the Continue button.
After watching this screen for a bit we are finally taken to this screen, completing the table creation process.
At this point, our new table is created. We have not defined any fields as yet, but every ServiceNow table gets a set of stock fields, and since we set up auto numbering, we will get a number field as well. The rest will obviously have to be done after the creation of the table. One of those new fields, however, will be a reference field pointing to our new technology type control table. That table has yet to be created though, so before we start adding fields to our account master table, we should probably repeat this exercise for the control table. There is no point in going through the entire exercise, but here is the screen shot with the relevant information for our second table.
Now that we have created both of our new tables, we can start defining all of the fields, including the reference field that defines the relationship between the two. That’s probably a bit of work in and of itself, so let’s save all of that for our next installment.
