A lot has changed since I last wrote about SN Utils, but one thing hasn’t changed: I still use the hell out of SN Utils.
Here’s a rundown of my current favorite or updated features:
- Show Technical Names
- I find myself using this more and more, especially in the service catalog in a portal. The way to invoke technical names in a service portal is by using the slashcommand “/tn”. My best use case for this is viewing variable names on the catalog item, record producer, or order guide pages. So, so useful.
- Adding dotwalked and/or sys_id columns to a list view.
- This one really blew me away when I first saw it in the release notes. Personalizing a list view is very limited unless you’re willing to go through the hassle of creating a report from a list view, etc. That’s way too much effort when I typically just want to add a related field, like a user’s manager or location, to a list view. Some admins I know will customize the default list view just to do this, but that’s inconsiderate to every other user of the platform.
- To make this happen:
- View any list and then click the gear icon to bring up the Personalize List Columns modal.
- Double-click any white space (though I usually aim below the up/down arrows all the way on the right due to what I believe was a bug in the initial implementation of this) and you’ll see the interface shows technical names.
- It also shows “Add dotwalk field (confirm with enter)” in a new field below the ‘Selected’ box and a “+ sys_id” link at the top.
- Click the sys_id link to add the sys_id for the record as the first column in the Selected box. (You can rearrange it if you want to.)
- In the “Add dotwalk field…”, type the name of a reference field (like “caller_id” on the incident table) followed by a dot and the name of a field (like “caller_id.manager”).
- Press “Enter” to add to the Selected box.
- Continue this until all the necessary dotwalked fields are added.
- Click OK and the list will refresh with your newly-added columns.
- The last item I want to highlight is a custom slashcommand that I added after being denied a feature request: New Update Set. This allows me to get to the new update set form without first clicking the list icon in the update set picker or navigating to Local Update Sets in the application navigator.
- Command: nus
- URL: sys_update_set.do?sys_id=-1
- Hint: New update set in current scope
As always, I’m incredibly grateful that SN Utils is a thing and development is still on-going. If you’d like to learn more, visit https://www.arnoudkooi.com/ and if you have some spare change, the author of the plugin has a Patreon.