My Takeaways from the #BuildWithAES Challenge

[Nia McCash]

For my #BuildWithAES challenge app, I created a writing Submission Tracker. (Skip the pre-amble of my app and jump to my key takeaways below).

tl;dr; I really enjoyed working on this personal project and really wish that ServiceNow had an affordable service/plan for hobby developers or small businesses so that I could share my app with the writing community  who may benefit and be interested in using such a thing. ServiceNow is already a great platform for quickly developing a variety of useful custom apps. AES makes app development more accessible to more people. Wouldn't it be great to be able to share these apps with the world? I'm sure I'm not the first to wish for such a service/plan. Would love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below 👇.

My Submission Tracking App

Those in the literary world/writing community would be familiar with the process of submitting to literary magazines in hopes of getting your writing (poem, story, memoir, etc) published. The process can be grueling and takes many attempts. Most writers keep track of their submissions which can number in the hundreds over time.

Since dipping my toe into the literary world, I have been tracking my own submissions in a spreadsheet - multiple tabs organized by the work I submitted, by the magazine/journal I submitted to - and because I like data and statistics, I have been wrangling the data to determine how many times I've submitted a particular piece of writing or how many times I've submitted to a particular magazine.

I used AES to create a submission tracking application including a Workspace Experience which gives me a quick overview of my submissions:

And allows me to easily report on a number of statistics that I find fascinating:

What I Discovered in the Process

AES is quite intuitive and the UI is well designed. When configuring a table, AES allows you to configure a lot of options in a new, modern UI. For example, the pop-up that appears when configuring field types where the second drop down changes based on the field type you select:

And the way AES allows you to configure your choice lists:

You can't do everything in AES just yet. For example, you can configure UI Policies in AES but you'll see that if you go the Client Scripts section, it will say To inspect or edit the full client scripts list, open the item in Now Platform. But I can see how one can argue that anything which requires scripting is not meant for the target users of AES.

The upside of this discovery (as I was trying to create a Business Rule) was that it reminded me to use a Flow to create business logic rather than a Business Rule.

Pay special attention when configuring a workspace. For example, this step configures the lists that show up in your workspace:

But past this point, I couldn't figure out how to re-configure these lists in AES if I'd made a mistake or wanted to add to the list! If you know how to reconfigure the lists in AES, please comment below 👇.

Also, workspaces come with these defaults for creating new records and I could not figure out how to change these configurations in AES:

After some digging, I found these instructions in the official docs for updating these options, and it requires you to modify the JSON.

[Mark Manders]

I completely agree on the sharing part. If you create something awesome, you want to share it. But if you're really proud of it, you could load it to the share. Or just add your application to your article for download, so it can be used by more people. Just my 2 cents.

Mark

[Nia McCash]

I should clarify that when I mean share. I don't mean share with other developers. I guess I should say I want to allow (end) users to use the app that I have created.