Exercise 1: Creating tables for our travel request application

Duration: 20 minutes

Introduction

In the first section, we will create two tables. Our first table will be used to capture the Travel Requests coming in from employees, and our second table will be used to store all the major airports and cities that can be traveled to. We will assume that all Travel Requests will only be for air travel.

Let’s start

1. Click All, then search and click App Engine Studio

   

2. Click Create app on the top right of the screen

   

3. On the Create App page, name the app “Travel request”, and for description, enter “Track travel requests from employees.”

   

4. Click Continue

5. Leave the default roles - admin and user, and click Continue

6. Click Go to app dashboard

   What you’ve just done is create a scoped application. Scope uniquely identifies every application file, not just within a single ServiceNow instance, but in every instance around the world. Why is this important?

   • Scope protects an application, its files, and its data from conflicts with other applications.
   • Scope determines which parts of an application are available for use by other applications in ServiceNow.
   • Scope allows developers to configure which parts of their application can be acted on by other applications.
   • Scope prevents work done in the main ServiceNow browser window (not in Studio) from becoming part of an application’s files.
   • Witout Scope, it will be very difficult to govern new applications!

Create a Travel Request table

We will now create a table to capture the travel requests.

1. Under Data, click Add

   

2. Click Create a table

3. Click Get started

4. On the Add Data page, click Create from an existing table

5. Click Continue

   

6. On the next page, search and select Task

   

   The task table is one of the core tables provided on the platform. Any table that extends task can take advantage of task-specific functionality such as SLAs and Approvals. This speeds up the overall process and ease of building logic and functionality.

7. Click Continue

8. For Table label, enter Travel request. Table name should be auto-populated.

9. Check Auto number

10. For Prefix, enter TRVREQ

    

11. Click Continue

12. Allow all access for admin and Create and Read access for user

    

13. Click Continue

14. Click Edit table

15. If presented with the Welcome to Table builder pop-up, read through the steps, then close it.

16. You should now be on the Table Builder interface. Click Add new field, and add the following fields:

    Column label	Type
    Departure date	Date
    Return date	Date
    Estimated airfare	Decimal
    Reason for travel	Choice (Dropdown with –None–) : Internal meeting, Customer meeting, Training

17. Click Done

18. Your screen should look like this

    

19. Click Save

    At this point, we could also capture the Origin and Destination via a String field so that the users can enter free text, but for more consistency, let’s create an Airports table so that users can select these locations (like how you would select on any airline reservation website)

Create an Airport table

1. Click the App Home tab to return to the main view

   

2. Under Data, click Add

   

3. Click Create a table

4. Click Get started

5. This time, select Upload a spreadsheet

   

6. Click Continue

7. Download this file: airports.xlsx

8. Upload the downloaded file to the upload box. You should see the following screen once the upload is successful

   

9. IMPORTANT: Make sure to check the Import spreadsheet data box.

10. Click Continue

11. After a short loading time, you should land on the page that says: “Great! Here’s the info we brought over from your spreadsheet”

    

12. Scroll through the list to see all the fields that will be created. Notice that you can change the data Type if necessary, but we can leave everything as String fields for now

13. Click Continue

14. Under Table label, enter Airport. Table name will be automatically populate, leave it as it is

15. Check Auto number, leave the Prefix as it is

    

16. Click Continue

17. In the roles page, check All for admin, and only Read for user

    

18. Click Continue

19. Click Edit table

20. On the table editor, toggle Display on the Name row. This is what users will search for when selecting airports

    

21. Click Save on the top right of the screen

22. Click Preview

23. A new tab should open and show you the list of airports you have imported. Notice that there are 24 airports imported as per our excel spreadsheet.

    

    In case you were wondering, the Lat and Lon fields are deliberately left empty. In the optional bonus exercise, we will use an API to get these values, but has no impact on our exercises.

Great, you now have a table to store the list of Airports!

Completing the Travel request table

1. If the Travel request tab is still open, click to navigate to it

   

2. If not, return to App Home and open the Travel request table

3. Click Add new field, and add the following fields:

   Column label	Type
   Travel from	Reference (Airport)
   Travel to	Reference (Airport)

   

4. It should look like the following once you’ve added the two new fields

   

5. Click Save

   For simplicity, we are not adding additional fields like Daily estimated expenses, etc. You can always choose to add those fields if you want to.

Styling the backend form

1. Still in the table designer, click Forms

   

2. Remove the following fields from the screen by clicking the X icon

   • Assigned to
   • Configuration item
   • Priority
   • Parent
   • Active

   
   

   

3. These fields are inherited from the task table, and are not needed for the purposes of our application.

4. From the left sidebar, search and drag in the following fields onto the form views

   • Reason for travel
   • Opened by
   • Travel from
   • Travel to
   • Departure date
   • Return date
   • Estimated airfare

   
   

   

5. When completed, your form view should look similar to this

   

6. Click Save

Congratulations, you have completed Exercise 1 and now have a complete way to store the Travel requests from your employees.

Next exercise