Objective: Practice creating and editing records in the list and form view:

ServiceNow wouldn’t be very useful if you couldn’t change the records. Thankfully, there are many different ways to change the data as long as the user has permission. If you are operating in your personal developer instance, you should have admin privileges which will let you edit just about anything.

Exercise

1. In your Personal Developer Instance, navigate to Incident > Open

2. Filter the list to show Incidents where Active is true AND State is In Progress

3. Change an Incident record’s State to On Hold using the list edit (Learn more about list edit)

4. Choose a record to update

5. Double click the value in the State field to open the field edit pop up

6. Select On Hold from the dropdown box

7. Click the green check mark icon

8. Observe that the State field updates to On Hold

9. Change the state on multiple records to On Hold using the list edit (Learn more about editing multiple records in the list view)

10. Click the In Progress value on a different record

11. Hold the Shift key on your keyboard and press the down arrow key 5 times to select 6 records in total

12. Double click the value in the State field in any of the selected fields to open the field edit pop up

13. Select On Hold from the dropdown box

14. Click the green check mark icon

15. Observe that the State field on all 6 selected fields update to On Hold

16. Create a new Incident record

17. Click the New button in the list header

18. In the Caller field, type Fred

19. Select Fred Luddy from the auto complete

20. Type My computer won’t turn on into the Short description field

21. Click the Submit button in the form header

22. Update an existing Incident record using the form view

23. Choose a record to update

24. Click the value in the Number field (Ex: INC0000001) to open the record in the form view

25. Change the Contact Type to Phone

26. Right click in the form header to show the form context menu

27. Click Save in the form context menu

28. Observe that the record is saved and the form view is reloaded

29. Type We’ll take a look at this right away! into the Work Notes field

30. Click the Update button in the form header

31. Observe that the record is saved and you are returned to the list view

Review

List Edit

List editing allows quick record changes to be made without having to open up the form view. There are many potential caveats to this style of editing.

1. The user must have the correct permissions to edit the field.

2. Business rules that require certain fields may prevent list editing. For example, in a baseline instance if you try to update the Priority field, it will revert to the previous value. This is because of a rule that calculates the Priority based on the Impact and Urgency fields.

3. Other rules implemented by an administrator, such as UI Policies and Client Scripts, often don’t apply to the list view. For this reason, some administrators will disable list editing all together.

4. Even if list editing is enabled, some field types and tables do not support list editing

(Return to Step 3)

Multiple Record Editing

Editing multiple records at one time is one of those features that many users wish existed long before they realize it has been there the whole time. Of course, the way we demonstrated in this exercise is subject to all the same caveats as regular list editing.

But it is also possible to edit multiple records using the form view instead by selecting multiple records in the list view and using the Update Selected option in the list context menu. This will allow you to edit multiple fields on multiple records with one update.

Both of these options make batch operations much more efficient.

(Return to Step 4)