Managing global apps in the Studio

Since the Orlando release, it is possibe to use the Studio to develop Applications in the Global Scope.

We will see in this post how to achieve this and what are the limitations compared to scoped applications in the Studio.

Why use the Studio for Global Apps?

Before jumping in the how, let’s take a minute to summarize the why would we use the Studio for global applications.

Using the Studio offers several advantages for the developpement:

  • Leverage the publication of the apps, instead of using update sets;
  • Apply protecttion to the application’s assets: you can grab for example a change done to incident and protect it
  • Use the Studio interface for developpment
    • Create new files from Studio
    • Use the Application Explorer
    • Code Search
    • Work on multiple files with the tabbed interfaces
    • and so on…

Enable the global scope in the Studio

First step is to enable or allow the global scope in the Studio.

To do so, we need to add a system property: set (or create of it do not exist) the system property sn_g_app_creator.allow_global and set it to true.

Let’s create a Global application

To create a Global application, go to the System Applications - My Company Applications and click Create New.

Then fill the Name, the description and under Advanced settings choose Global. Then click Create.

My Company Application...

You can then continue the wizard as with a Scoped application or just click Continue in Studio (Advanced) if you don’t want to create roles, tables, etc.. now.

Adding existing files

In the studio, you can create new files or you can also import existing files from the Global Scope into your application.

Create, add or remove files from studio

When adding existing files, there are three options:

  • Add by update set: this will import the content of the udpate set in the app
  • Add a table
  • Add by name: providing the name of the element to add in the app
Create, add or remove files from studio

Limitations

There is no source control availlable on Global Application. The reason is that it would take the instance name and then can cause troubles when deploying somewhere else. Also the way it work now is that it deploy all the files and doing do in the Global can lead to important files to be overwritten and so on.

But this will change with the Paris release: ServiceNow will offer Git repository support for Global Scope via ‘delta loading’. The delta will avoid overwritting of essential files.

Working with the Visual Studio extension

In my tests, I could not edit the existing files added to the application from the Visual Studio. How ever, I could edit files that were created from the applications.

References

  1. Chuck Tomasi, NOWCommunity Live Stream - Topical Deep Dive - Global apps in Studio, broadcasted 2020 04 23
  2. ServiceNow documentation, Allow global application development in Guided Application Creator, accessed 2020 06 15
  3. ServiceNow documentation, Global application file management, accessed 2020 06 15