Hidden diamonds of Jakarta

[Goran WitchDoc]

I Guess by now that you have both seen and heard a lot of the new cool feature of Jakarta and what you can expect from upgrading to Jakarta. So this post isn't going to be about all those new big things like Software Asset Management and so on. I have spend some time digging around in documentation and playing around in the instance to see what have been put in there without any big notice or any drumbeats.

First out is Automated Test Framework(ATF). It can with Istanbul and gave us all a good ground to stand on and start doing automated testing. what was missing there was that it all had to be started/runned manually. Not anymore 😃 In Jakarta they have introduced the possibility to schedule test suite executions. It will make life even better and you can OOB schedule notifications with results etc. as well. Only downside atm. is that if you have tests that involves client stuff like adding values in a form field, you will need to have a browser open with the "Scheduled Client Test Runner" so the client side will be tested there. But still automated, so only manually thing is it leave a tab with that open.

Read more about it here: Schedule automated test suite

Next stop will be Knowledge. Knowledge got a few good things in Jakarta and here are two of those that I want to highlight.

• Article Versioning: Now you can have your articles with version. Giving your good opportunities to rollback and even work on a article without messing with the public one. I really enjoy this. Can read more about it here: Article versioning
• Different View in Service Portal: With Jakarta there have come a own Knowledge Portal. I might not really see the use case here atm. I think this is just another brick in the game to mve a lot of the functionality from the normal "UI" to a Service Portal design instead. But the portal looks pretty much like if you go to knowledge within the normal "UI" which has much better filtering etc. And here it now gives up a some widget that we can take and reuse on our own portal page 😃
  It looks something like this:

And you can read about the knowledge portal here: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/jakarta-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-management/con...

Knowledge Management Service Portal

Here is a very little thing, but I really like it. Don't we all hate when small images like signature etc. in the mail becomes attachments in the ticket. Now there is a property for this you can set how big a image must be for ServiceNow to add it as a attachment. Is it below the value, ServiceNow will ignore it. You can read more about that here: Email image filtering properties

Variables belonging in the Service Catalog has gotten a nice feature. To be able to put in Placeholder in the field of the different variable. Now we can move some of the help texts to inside the field and give a nicer look. This will work both in the normal "UI" and in Service Portal view. Why they didn't name the field "Placeholder" I can't say, but the name in SeviceNow is "Example Text". and it's working on the following variable types:

• IP Address
• Email
• URL
• Single Line Text
• Wide Single Line Text
• Multi Line Text
• Date
• Date/Time

For last we have the Service Portal. I would like to put up two nice things that has been added here, even if there is a lot to choose from.

• Draft: It is now possible to put a page in "draft" mode so it isn't visible for the end user the second you save it for the first time. Even if it's a nice feature, there might be some disadvantages of this You will find this choice in the "Edit Page Properties" in the designer:
  
• Variable types: Many people may have noticed that if you went into the docs for variable types and earlier releases, most of the have a text like this:
  
  But now, "all" variable types are supported on Service Portal, beside those who are using Jelly. But that is pretty obvious. One thing I noticed thou is that even if they are supported, they still don't always have the same functionality as in the normal "UI". Example container which in the normal "UI" has a +/- to expand & collapse the variables inside, they still don't have that functionality in Jakarta. But they are supported at least
  
  

Well, this was a few of the hidden diamonds I found so far in Jakarta. Feel free to comment if you have something you want me to put in the list here and I'll add it.

//Göran