TNT: Useful Bookmarklet - "nav_to"

[Jim Coyne]

Part of the "Tips 'N Tricks" series.

NOTE: This may not be as helpful now with the new "Next Experience" Unified Navigation (Polaris) that supports opening new tabs/windows with the full UI, but still relevant.

Sometimes you might end up with a tab/window that only contains the main window, either with a form, list or some UI Page, without the banner and Navigator surrounding the frame.  You probably cmd+clicked a link to open a form or list in the new tab/window.

Sometimes we want to get back into the full frame UI, including the banner and Navigator.   It's easy to do, just have to add "nav_to.do?uri=" between "service-now.com/" and the rest of the URL.   But that can be a pain, so I created a bookmarklet to help.

All you have to do is create a new bookmark in your favourite browser, name it "nav_to" or whatever you want and paste the following code into the URL or Location field:

javascript: (function(){
  /* now supports multiple domains */
  try {
    const domain = [".service-now.com/", ".custom-domain.com/"];
    var found = false;
    var url = window.location.toString();


    /* loop through each domain */
    domains = domain.length;
    let i = 0;
    do {
      /* is it a domain we are interested in AND "nav_to.do" is NOT already in the URL */
      if (url.indexOf(domain[i]) > -1 && url.indexOf(domain[i] + "nav_to.do") == -1) {
        found = true;
        url = url.replace(domain[i], domain[i] + "nav_to.do?uri=");
        window.location = url;
      }
      i++;
    } while (i < domains && !found);


  } catch(err) {}
})();

NOTE: When you paste the code into the bookmark/favourite, change the ":" with the colon character ":".

You will end up with a bookmark you can click to quickly switch you into the full UI:

The code now supports looking for URLs in multiple domains (my current client is using the Custom URL feature, so I may be logged into the instance via the service-now.com or the custom domain).  It will loop through the list of domains and if it finds it AND if the URL does NOT contain "nav_to.do", it will replace "domain name/" with "domain name/nav_to.do?uri=" and then reloads the page.  Most users can just use:

const domain = [".service-now.com/"];

...if you are not using Custom URLs.

Simple and effective.  There is not a lot of checking for certain strings in the URL to ensure it is a valid ServiceNow URL, but that would be way too complicated: have to let the user make some decisions on their own before clicking away.  🤓