Provision your PDI or company/customer instances quicker, smarter (05): Applying Utilities

[Mark Roethof]

Hi there,

So you are about to reset your PDI? Or requesting a new PDI? Logging in for the first time on your fresh instance, and… darn, I have to set up all kinds of settings, personal preferences, utilities, etc. all over again! Can we somehow get those settings, personal preferences, utilities back on the fresh PDI? How can we start quicker with a slightly personal provisioned PDI?

I'm writing a few short Community Blogs on this topic. To share with you, how I tend to provision my PDI quicker.

Some of these ideas could also apply for company/customer instances. For example, if you are working as a consultant you will be faced with several companies, new instances every year. Yes, also on these instances you can get a head start!

The topics which I'm going to share in the upcoming days:
- Setting-up your personal user account
- Recommended System Properties and User Preferences
- Favorite Favorites
- Applying Plugins
- Applying Utilities

Applying Utilities

In the previous four blogs we've set up a personal user account, a Fix Script to add Personalized Lists, recommended System Properties and User Preferences, our favorite Favorites and applying plugins scripted. Another really annoying and very time consuming one… applying utilities all over again.

Utilities

There are always some utilities you want to have activated on your Personal Developer Instance. For example:
- Enable Service Portal Syntax Editor Macro
- Show Contents of g_scratchpad
- UI16 Developer Patch
- View Data to Preserve

As you can already see, some are on Share, some on the Community, other sources might be a GIT repository, etcetera.

Obviously multiple ways on what you can do with this. And that's completely up-to-you! I'm just sharing my thought on this.

Batch Update Set

Because the Utilities come from several sources, or some even only described in a Community article, I've added them all in separate Update Sets to my instance. This way I've got all Utilities I'm after within reach.
Unfortunately you do have to keep track of updates on some of the Utilities, for example the ones on Share.

So now we do have all the Utilities within reach, though exporting and re-applying them all over one by one when refreshing your Personal Developer Instance is still a time-consuming job. "Batch Update Sets" is the key here!

I've just set up a parent Update Set and added the Update Sets from the Utilities I'm after as a child to this parent Update Set. Once you've added one or more child Update Sets to your parent Update set and then closed the parent Update Set, a Related Link "Export Update Set Batch to XML" will be visible on the Update Set form lay-out.

In short, "Export Update Set Batch to XML" will export the parent Update Sets and it's childs with their components (the actual Customer Updates!).

More on Update Set batching? See this Docs page:
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/orlando-application-development/page/build/system-update-sets/hie...

Loading Update Set

The exported Batch Update Set, can be imported on your Personal Developer Instance just like any other XML import you would normally do. After importing, the parent and child Update Sets should be visible when navigating to the Retrieved Update Sets. Notice the State column in the Retrieved Update Sets List View, for example:

You would only have to open, Preview and Commit the parent Update Set. This would already preview and commit all Update Sets! No need to preview and commit all of them one by one 🙂

If accidentally opening one of the child Update Sets, a small informative message is displayed:

Result

And that's it actually! Not much too it. Though just a thought to share with you, on how to secure the Utilities you are after, and how to re-apply all of them with as little as time-consuming possible. Obviously multiple other ways are possible to achieve the same. This is just one to share with you.

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If any questions or remarks, let me know!

👍

If this post helped you in any way, I would appreciate it if you hit bookmark or mark it as helpful. Interested in more articles, blogs, videos, and Share projects on "Provision your PDI or company/customer instances quicker, smarter" I published? - Setting-up your personal user account - Recommended System Properties and User Preferences - Favorite Favorites - Applying Plugins - Applying Utilities

Kind regards,
Mark
2020 ServiceNow Community MVP
2020 ServiceNow Developer MVP

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