Populate Order Guide on Request Ticket

UPDATE: As of the Helsinki ServiceNow release, this is tracked for you automatically in a new ‘Order Guide’ field on the ‘Requested Item’ table! This solution should be discontinued in Helsinki releases and beyond.

O

rder guides are a service catalog concept that allow you to set up an initial form to ask the user certain questions in order to determine a collection of catalog items they need to order. The classic use case for an order guide is the ‘New Employee Hire’ item that ServiceNow provides in the out-of-box demo data. While order guides are really a front-end routing concept, it can sometimes be useful to report on requests that were generated for a particular order guide. This functionality doesn’t exist out-of-box in ServiceNow, but it is very easy to add. Here’s a good tip that I recently learned from Sean Grison and Valor Poland about how to populate the order guide used to generate a particular request.

Only three steps are necessary to record the order guide used to generate a request…

1. Create a new reference field called ‘Order guide’ on the ‘Request (sc_request)’ table. The field needs to reference the ‘Order guide (sc_cat_item_guide)’ table. You may also choose to secure write access to this field using an ACL since it really shouldn’t need to be changed by any user.
2. Create a new business rule on the ‘Request (sc_request)’ table with the following settings…
   ‘Populate Order Guide’ Business Rule
   Name: Populate Order Guide
   When: Before
   Insert: True
   Script:

   var c = new GlideRecord('sc_cart');
   c.get('user', gs.getUserID());
   if(c.current_guide){
      var isOrderGuide = true;
      var foundItemCount = 0;
      //Query the order guide rule base
      var og = new GlideRecord('sc_cat_item_guide_items');
      og.addQuery('guide', c.current_guide);
      og.query();
      while(og.next()){
         var mustHave = false;
         var foundItem = false;
         //If the condition is empty then item must be ordered
         if(og.condition.nil()){
            mustHave = true;
         }
         //Check to see if the rule matches at least one item in the cart
         var itm = new GlideRecord('sc_cart_item');
         itm.addQuery('cart', c.sys_id);
         itm.addQuery('cat_item', og.item.sys_id.toString());
         itm.query();
         if(itm.hasNext()){
            foundItem = true;
            foundItemCount++;
         }
         if(mustHave && !foundItem){
            //Do not update order guide
            isOrderGuide = false;
            break;
         }
      }
      if(isOrderGuide && foundItemCount > 0){
         //If actual order guide items are included populate the order guide field
         current.u_order_guide = c.current_guide;
      }
   }
3. Set up a ‘Write’ ACL on your new ‘Order guide’ field to restrict access to the field. This field should only be modified by the system as part of the ordering process so you should set up an ACL to limit those permissions. The simplest way to do this is to set up a write ACL for ‘sc_request.u_order_guide’ with the ‘nobody’ role and un-check the ‘Admin override’ checkbox.

Now when users order an item using a record producer, the record producer will be referenced in the ‘Order guide’ field you created on the request table!