“Hide not your Talents, they for Use were made. What’s a Sun-Dial in the shade!” — Benjamin Franklin
Last time, we wrapped up most of the work on the script that will handle the review process right up to the point where we need to send out the notice to the recipient. Today we will look at one way to send out an email notification and then build the notice that we will want to send out.
One of the easiest ways to trigger an outbound email is through the use of a System Event, not to be confused with an Event ManagementEvent, which is an entirely different animal. And neither one of those is related in any way to a ServiceNow Event, but now we are really getting off track. To create a new Event, we will navigate to the Event Registry and then click on the New button.
New System Event
Once we have created our new event, we can create an Email Notification and have the notification triggered by this event. To create our new Email Notification, we will navigate to All > System Notification > Email > Notifications and click on the New button. At this point, let’s not worry too much about the content of the message and let’s just do enough so that we can test things out and make sure that it all works. Once we establish that the email is actually sent out, we can go back in and create the message body that will work for our requirements.
New Email Notification
Under the When to send tab, we select Event is fired from the Send when options and then we select our new event from the Event name options. Then on the Who will receive tab, we check the box labeled Event parm 1 contains recipient, which will allow us to send in the recipient as one of the event parameters.
Identifying the intended recipient
In the What it will contain tab, we will just put the word Testing in the subject and body for now and then save the record so that we can run a test. Now we need to modify our Script Include to initiate the event, passing in the appropriate parameters, namely the notification record and the intended recipient. We will replace this line that we added for earlier testing:
gs.info('This is where we would send a notice to ' + noticeGR.getDisplayValue('recipient'));
… with this new code to add a new instance of the event to the queue:
// now you need to send out the notice, passing in the notice record for variables
gs.eventQueue('x_11556_periodic_r.ReviewNotice', noticeGR, noticeGR.recipient, noticeGR.getUniqueValue());
noticeCt++;
After we save that we can pop back over to Scripts – Background and see if all of this results in some email being sent out.
New test results
Well, that looks pretty good, but let’s take a look at the email logs and see if we actually sent out some notices.
Notification emails generated
OK, that works! Now that we know that our process will send out the notices to the designated recipients, the next thing that we will need to do is to come up with the content of the notice. That sounds like a good project for our next installment.
“Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.” — Cory House
Last time, we built out the processExecution function in our utility Script Include, and now we need to continue on by building out the sendNotices function. Before we build it out completely, though, let’s just create a quick stub so that we can test out the work so far. This ought to do the trick.
Now we just need to make sure that we have the next run date set correctly on our lone example configuration and then we can navigate over to Scripts – Background and type in our earlier testing code.
var pru = new PeriodicReviewUtils();
pru.dailyProcess();
gs.info('Done!');
And once again we can hit that Run script button and see what happens.
Initial test results
Well, that’s not good! It seems that there is some kind of problem with our calculateNextRunDate function. It’s always something! But then, that’s why I like to test things out as I go rather than waiting for the entire thing to be built to try things out. The good news is that it seems to have run all of the way through and made it all the way to the end, where it updates the run date, before it crashed and burned. Let me dig into that function and see what might be wrong.
(insert brief debugging pause)
OK, I found the issue. Apparently, it doesn’t like this line:
var runDate = new Date(configurationGR.getDisplayValue('next_scheduled_date'));
The next scheduled date on the configuration record is a GlideDate, and the display value is year, month, and then day. The Javascript Date constructor doesn’t like that, although I know that I have done that in the past without issue. Still, it doesn’t really matter because the value should be today’s date; otherwise, we wouldn’t be running right now. So we can simple change that to this:
var runDate = new Date();
That should still get us the date that we are looking for, so let’s hop back over to Scripts – Background and try this again.
Successful test results
That’s better. So far, so good. Now we need to actually build out that sendNotices function to group all of the notice item records by recipient, create a notice record for each recipient, and then send out the notices. We can develop an unduplicated list of recipients by using a GlideAggregate.
var noticeItemGA = new GlideAggregate('x_11556_periodic_r_review_notice_item');
noticeItemGA.addQuery('review_notice', tempNotice);
noticeItemGA.addAggregate('COUNT');
noticeItemGA.groupBy('recipient');
noticeItemGA.orderBy('recipient');
noticeItemGA.query();
while (noticeItemGA.next()) {
var recipient = noticeItemGA.getValue('recipient');
...
}
Once we have the recipient, we can create the notice record for that recipient.
Now that a notice record for this recipient has been created, we need to go back and find all of the notice item records that are associated with this recipient and update the reference to the notice record from the temporary notice to the newly created notice for this recipient.
At this point, we should be able to send out the notice, but as that is a rather complex process in and of itself, let’s just stub things out for now so that we can test out the process so far.
gs.info('This is where we would send a notice to ' + noticeGR.getDisplayValue('recipient'));
All together, our new sendNotices function now looks like this.
sendNotices: function(configurationGR, executionGR, noticeGR, noticeItemGR, tempNotice) {
gs.info('PeriodicReviewUtils.sendNotices: ' + configurationGR.getUniqueValue() + '; ' + executionGR.getUniqueValue() + '; ' + noticeGR.getUniqueValue() + '; ' + noticeItemGR.getUniqueValue() + '; ' + tempNotice);
var noticeCt = 0;
var noticeItemGA = new GlideAggregate('x_11556_periodic_r_review_notice_item');
noticeItemGA.addQuery('review_notice', tempNotice);
noticeItemGA.addAggregate('COUNT');
noticeItemGA.groupBy('recipient');
noticeItemGA.orderBy('recipient');
noticeItemGA.query();
while (noticeItemGA.next()) {
var recipient = noticeItemGA.getValue('recipient');
noticeGR.initialize();
noticeGR.review_execution = executionGR.getUniqueValue();
noticeGR.recipient = recipient;
noticeGR.short_description = executionGR.getDisplayValue('run_date') + ' review notice for ' + configurationGR.getDisplayValue('short_description');
noticeGR.insert();
noticeItemGR.initialize();
noticeItemGR.addQuery('recipient', recipient);
noticeItemGR.addQuery('review_notice', tempNotice);
noticeItemGR.query();
while (noticeItemGR.next()) {
noticeItemGR.review_notice = noticeGR.getUniqueValue();
noticeItemGR.update();
}
gs.info('This is where we would send a notice to ' + noticeGR.getDisplayValue('recipient'));
}
}
That should be enough to give things the old college try. Let’s pop back over to Scripts – Background and paste in our testing code and see what we get.
Testing results
Nice! Obviously, a lot more testing is in order before we can say for sure that everything works for every scenario, but things are looking pretty good. Next time, let’s see if we can actually send out a notice.
