“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
— Aristotle
Last time, we finished up our two data tables and got started on the Catalog Item that people will use to request a Service Account. Today we need to jump back into the App Engine Studio and complete the work on that Catalog Item. To begin, we can pull up the dashboard for our Scoped Application and select our new Catalog Item from the list of Experiences.
Once we select our Catalog Item, a new tab opens up with all of the details.
Here we can see that there is quite a lot more detail that we can add, but before we start exploring all of the links on the right-hand side, let’s go ahead and scroll down and complete the information for the Item details section.
For now, we will just use the same image that we used for the app itself and the same text as the Short Description that we entered earlier. We may improve all of that later on, but this will get us going for now. At this point, we can click on the Continue to Location -> link.
Here we can specify that we want the item in the Technical Catalog and assign it to the Services category. Then we will click on the Continue to Questions -> link to move on to the next section.
Questions are the means through which we collect information from the requester about their request. For our purpose, we will need to know the type of account requested, the desired user ID or account name, and the name of the group that will be responsible for the account. For the benefit of the request approvers, we may also want to collect the purpose of the account or the justification for its creation. We can add these questions, one at a time, but clicking on the Insert new question button.
On the Question insert screens, we can define a name and a label for our question as well as type, which in our case will be a choice list from our Service Account Type table. You can see the two options that we added to the table come up on the drop-down list in the Question Preview section. We can Save this Question and continue to add more Questions using the Insert new question button. When we are all through adding our questions, they appear on the list.
Once we have completed all of the Questions for our item, the next step is to move on to the Settings section.
Here we select the label for the submit button and check a few boxes to configure how our item will appear on the Service Portal. Once that is done, we move on to the Access section.
Here, we make our item available to admins, ITIL users, and the Service Desk. Once that has been established, we move on to the Fulfillment section.
Here we need to select the fulfillment flow that will be used to respond to the request. We have not yet built out a fulfillment flow for our Catalog Item, so we will need to do that first before we can complete this section. Once it has been completed, we can circle back and select it from the list to complete this section, after which the only thing left to do will be to go to the final Review and Submit section. Creating a flow that will handle all of the various types of Service Accounts will be a bit of work in and of itself, so let’s stop here for now and jump right into that next time out.
