What Developers Need to Know about Geneva: Part 1 - Studio

[dave_slusher]

The Geneva release has a number of new features of interest to developers on the ServiceNow platform. In this series of blog posts, I will cover some of these topics in a little more depth. As always, please leave feedback about which topics you would like to see covered.

The first thing you will see as you develop applications is the new Studio environment (System Applications > Studio). From here you can manage your downloaded scoped applications, as well as all the applications you are developing on the instance.

If you edit an application such as the Marketing Events application from the training courses, you will be presented with the new IDE interface.

The IDE interface allows you to interact with your application more like you would with a desktop development tool. You can open any of your already created application files with a click, or create new ones with a keyboard shortcut (Cmd-Shift-o).   Each of these application files will open in a new tab in the IDE so multiple files can be edited simultaneously without leaving any form pages or creating new browser tabs. You don't have to complete work in any given tab to open another one since each tab is an independent context. If you want changes to reflect in another one (such as changing a table in one tab and then editing that table's form in an another) you will have to save the work in the tabs and reload the other forms.

As you edit application files, you will see the close control change to a blue dot. This is the indicator of an IDE tab with unsaved changes. If you try to close one of those tabs, you'll be presented with a confirmation dialog to make sure that is what you intend. This makes it more difficult to accidentally close a tab with unsaved work in it. The system will try to prevent you from doing that.

When you open the "Create New Application File" dialog, you can either navigate from the category hierarchy or use the filter bar to select the type of file you want to create.

Note that as soon as you leave the name field, you'll see the tab title change to display the information you entered. The IDE environment is highly responsive and aims to feel less like a web application and more like a native client tool.

You can also use the Go To functionality to search across the names of all your application files. This search works across both the Name field, as well as the object names themselves as you can see in this example.

The Code Search functionality allows you to search for code snippets. You can limit it to code on a single table via the drop down or you can even expand it across all applications on your instance with the checkbox.

When the search is executed, the results will show you the number of application files that have a match to the search string. For each matched file, it will show the title of the object with the number of individual lines that match and then show the matches in context.

This is just a small portion of the changes to make the developer experience more efficient and pleasant. In the next blog post, we will examine some of the new features for authoring script code in Studio.

Other entries in this series:

What's New in Geneva for Developers?

What Developers Need to Know about Geneva: Part 2 - Script Editor