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When users shoot themselves in the foot

· 2 min read
Eric Riemer
ServiceNow Wizard

The setup

I no longer work with end users very often, but this came across my desk (errr... I got a message on the SNDevs Slack). There was a person in the NextGen program who was working on a project. They had created a custom table and could not get to a next step because half of the fields on the form weren't showing up.

The instructor had checked the usual suspects... The fields were part of the form view, there weren't any UI policies, Data Policies, or Client Scripts hiding them. All the ACLs were passed so that wasn't the issue either.

And... this issue was only happening to a single user account. When the instructor logged in as a different user, they could see the fields just fine.

Any guesses what the problem was?

Updating Store Apps Sucks

· 5 min read
Eric Riemer
ServiceNow Wizard

First posted August 13, 2023

Updated May 15, 2024

The Pain

Every quarter or so, ServiceNow released updates to Store apps. This is usually a good thing. The bad part is that you also have to update them in your instance.

One...

At...

A...

Time...

In...

Each...

Instance...

It's painful.

Color generation, Next Experience (Polaris) Themes Part 3

· 6 min read
Eric Riemer
ServiceNow Wizard

This is Part 3. You should start with Part 1.

How do the 'Base' colors get expanded?

In Part 1 I mentioned that theme JSON has 2 parts, Base and Properties, and that for some elements defined in Base they get expanded into some number of variations on that color.

How does that work? Which things can even be defined that way? Is there any way to know what --now-color--primary-2 will look like if I have defined --now-color--primary?

All about Next Experience (Polaris) Themes Part 1

· 6 min read
Eric Riemer
ServiceNow Wizard

Next Experience Theming

When the new Next Experience UI came out with San Diego, everything about how to theme an instance changed. I have always liked making my instances look like "mine" or the company I worked for, so I was very interested in seeing what I could do with the new UI. This article is going to be the first in a series where I try to document all the things I know or have figured out about how to theme ServiceNow.