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Handling Assignment Rules in ServiceNow

In ServiceNow, if one is looking for automatic assignments then he can rely on the instance’s ability to assign the tasks automatically to different users and groups depending on the specified conditions. In order to achieve this, ServiceNow has the following modules:

• Assignment Lookup Rules
• Assignment Rules

Assignment Lookup Rules:

This module appears under the ‘System Policy application’ menu. This table is basically generated out of the box as its definition is provided in the ‘Data Lookup Definition’ table in the instance, specifically for field assignments in the incident table. Assignment lookup rules mainly provide the functionality of changing any field value and not just the assignment fields.

Assignment Rules:

This module appears under the ‘System Policy application’ menu. It helps to automatically assign the tasks to a particular user or a particular group using the assigned_to and assignment_group fields respectively, depending on the specified set of conditions. One can define these assignment rules readily for their desired table.

Following are the steps for defining the assignment rule:

• Navigate to System Policy -> Assignment -> New

• From the above figure, one can see that the dot-walking can also be done in the condition builder field. Just select the ‘Show Related Fields’ option in the condition and then select the appropriate attribute.
• Further, in the ‘Assign To’ tab, select the appropriate user and group to whom the task is to be assigned.

If two assignment rules conflict, then the assignment rule with the lowest execution order runs first. The lower the execution order, the higher is the precedence.

Distinguishing Factors between the Data Lookup Rules and Assignment Rules:

Precedence among the assignment rule and business rule:.

In certain circumstances, the business rules gain precedence over the assignment rules.

The business rules and assignments rules run in the following order:

• All the ‘before record insert’ business rules having order less than 1000.
• First and foremost, assignment rule with lowest execution order and matching condition.
• All the ‘before record insert’ business rules having order more than 1000.
• All the ‘after record insert’ business rules.

We are pretty sure that this blog must have given an overview of dealing with Assignment Rules in ServiceNow.

Any comments\suggestions are most welcome. We have posted further blogs as well on other topics and will frequently come back with something innovative.

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Control the Execution Order of Request Items in an Order Guide

Lately I’ve been doing some service catalog work for a couple of clients and I’ve come across a requirement that I really haven’t had to address before. The requirement deals with order guides…specifically with the ability to control the execution order of individual items within an order guide. You’re probably aware that ServiceNow provides complete control over the ordering of tasks within a catalog item, but what do you do with an order guide that needs to have one item complete before the next 2 items can start? There’s not a simple way to control this behavior by default so I came up with a way and I’ll share it here.

Initial setup

A ll of this depends on having the ability to identify whether or not an order guide is associated with an item that has been ordered, and which order guide that is. As such, your first step will be to make sure that you are recording the order guide used against the parent request record. This setup is not provided by default but you can add it by following the instructions in this article .

NOTE: This is recorded for you automatically in the Helsinki release and beyond! The instructions below reflect these changes as of the Helsinki release.

Establishing an execution order

Once you’ve validated that the order guide is being populated correctly you’re ready to set up the execution order for your items within that order guide. The solution is actually pretty simple and only requires 2 pieces, both of which are implemented in the workflow for the respective items within an order guide.

Example: In order to illustrate this setup, I’ll use a simple example. Let’s say that you have an order guide for new hires that includes 2 items; ‘Computer Workstation’ and ‘Computer Software’. Both of these items need to be ordered and delivered as part of the new hire process, but they need to be delivered in a specific order. The ‘Computer Software’ item cannot be started until the ‘Computer Workstation’ item has finished because we need to have a workstation to be able to install the software.

The first step is to modify the graphical workflow associated with item 1 (the ‘Computer Workstation’ catalog item). The workflow should run through the same process whether or not the item is ordered as part of an order guide, but at some point in the workflow (probably right before the end) we need to check if the item is associated with an order guide and then tell the next item to start. The next item in this case is ‘Computer Software’.

We don’t have direct access to the next item, but we can easily set up a ‘Run script’ workflow activity to query for that item and set a value there telling the item that it can start. I’ve found that the simplest way of doing this is to set the ‘State’ field on the next request item record to ‘Work in Progress’. The script below can be used in your ‘Run script’ activity in your workflow. Just replace the name of the ‘Computer Software’ item below with the name of the item in your system.

This script works great, but it’s only part of the puzzle! Unless you tell item 2 (Computer Software) to wait for item 1 (Computer Workstation) then your script isn’t going to work the way you need it to. So, the second configuration change you’ll need to make is to add a ‘Wait for’ activity to the graphical workflow associated with item 2 (Computer Software). The ‘Wait for’ activity placement should probably be the first activity in the item 2 workflow, but will depend on your specific workflow. It should only apply if an order guide is associated with the parent request and the state is ‘Work in Progress.

If you’ve followed the instructions above correctly, you should now be able to order your order guide item and execute the items in the order you’ve specified in the workflows. You can handle any order guide execution order scenario by repeating the same steps in the workflow for each item. If you have multiple items that need to start when item 1 is finished, then simply add those items to the script from item 1 and add the wait for condition to items 2, 3, 4, etc…

Bonus! Copying variable values from one item to another

Because your items are associated under a single order guide, it might also be necessary to pass variable values from one item to another. In order to do this, you’ll need to make sure that each item sharing variable values this way has an identically-named variable to place the value in. Once you’ve got that you could execute the following script inside a workflow ‘Run script’ activity.

Mark Stanger

Date Posted:

August 23, 2011

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15 Comments

I had a similar requirement in the past to be able to choose an existing requested item and copy all the variables into a new request. I used JSON to build a string with all the name/value pairs and then set the form with the client script.

Script Include (findItemVariables)

Catalog Client Script

Awesome. Thanks for sharing this. If I needed to populate the variables in a client script I would definitely use something like this. If I needed to populate the variables in a workflow or business rule I could use a script like mine above.

This is great. I’m doing something similar, but I’m opening the flood gates after the User Creation RITM is complete on a New Hire. We have to wait for the user to be created in LDAP, sync’d to ServiceNow and update the “Requested For” so it becomes accurate on the Desktop, Software, Phone requested items, etc.

I implemented this and works perfectly. However, given that the “next items” are waiting for the first one to complete IF approved (in my case), how do I get to cancel the workflows for these “next items” if the first one is not approved, as these others depend on this approval?

Thanks in advance for your input.

Cheers, Luis

You’ll have to query for the other items and close them (which should cancel the workflows). If it doesn’t then you can force the workflow cancellation as shown here… https://servicenowguru.com/scripting/business-rules-scripting/canceling-executing-workflows-task-closure/

Hi Mark, This is fantastic, thank you. Any ideas on how to set the variable in Step 2 in the latest Eureka release? request.order guide isn’t a variable I can choose… I can plug in parent.tasktype and use that as a Request, but that assumes that every REQ is going to be part of an order guide… bit messy?

Cheers, -Adam

Have you followed the initial setup listed above? In order to get the ‘request.u_order_guide’ field you have to create it by following the instructions included in the article I link to above.

Of course not! I’m a user and only half-read everything :) I’ll give it a crack tonight and see how I go, thanks for being polite about it!

Hi Mark, Do you know if Geneva or Helsinki has any sort of OOB functionality for this, or are you still using your custom approach with clients?

There’s nothing new in Helsinki or Geneva to do this as far as I know.

Just to validate, do all of the request items still get created at the very beginning? Does this just control when certain request item’s states gets set to “work in progress” as dependent items are completed?

All of the requested item records will always get created right at the beginning regardless of what you do. This helps to control the workflow so that they only get opened and put into people’s work queue when they’re supposed to.

I’m a bit confused on the second step. Based on the provided example, it looks like it will wait on the “wait activity” even when the request isn’t made from an Order Guide.

Are you saying there should be a “conditional if activity” before the “wait activity” checking if the Order Guide is set on the request?

Yes, the example shown above would really only apply if the second item was always part of the order guide. A conditional activity in your second item would allow the flexibility of handling multiple types of flows.

The script to pass variables between various catalog item should be written in which workflow..I tried putting it in the 1st Requested item but it didnt work… The other scripts work as expceted.

Comments are closed.

Randall King says:

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Execution order of scripts

Scripts in the ServiceNow platform are executed in the following order:

• Before business rules : Business rule scripts, with an order less than 1,000, configured to execute before the database operation
• Before engines: Workflow, approval, and other engines
• Before business rules : Scripts configured to execute before the database operation but with an order greater than or equal to 1,000
• Database operation: Insert, update, delete, or query operation
• After business rules : Scripts with an order less than 1,000 configured to execute after the database operation
• After engines : Text indexing and workflow engines (for deferred workflows)
• E-mail notifications : Notifications sent on an insert, update, or delete and event-based ...

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