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hi my name is mike moody and i welcome you to the moody coda youtube channel i this uh whole video streaming thing is new to me so i asked for your apologies uh lack of eloquence and what have you i am a servicenow platform developer i've been working in the industry for over eight years and i've worked with managed service providers in the past multi domain separated instances and uh today i work for ebay as the team lead architect and servicenow developer so today i just wanted to go ahead and actually share something new that i had to develop um as a requirement at work and uh so what was being requested by the user was they wanted to have an experience in the service portal where they could have the ability to do a multi multi-select of multiple answers from a question but then also once those selections are made they want to be able to have the ability to provide additional information but not just a single input field of additional information but additional information pertinent to each one of those specific selections so um what i did is uh and i'm going to show you now and try to build this out is i came up with a thought and idea to essentially implement a list collector experience to give that multi-selection capability in combination with a multi-row variable set that will allow them to input additional specific information for those selections that they've made so i have my personal developer instance open here and what i'm going to do is going to go ahead and get started by creating a new catalog item so i'll do that now all right so we're going to create a new catalog item here and i'm just going to call it something generic test catalog item seems good enough to me yeah let's be a little bit more specific let's see testing uh list collector with multi-row variable so let's do that a little bit more specific all right so go ahead and submit this item okay now from here i'm going to go ahead and define my variables so i'll start by creating a list collector variable now um and this is another thing that uh i i found to be quite useful so you know if you want to have a sort of a multi-select experience with a list collector variable but you don't want to necessarily have to um define a new table so by default it kind of forces you to do so so let me show you what i'm talking about here so if you go to um a list collector type of object and you go to the type specification here they're asking you to specify what is the list table so in most cases i i think they're expecting that you will create a custom table and populate that custom table with your uh your records of choice that you want to be able to to select from this list collector since i don't want to go in and create a new custom table i just want to add some custom answers somewhere in maybe an existing table i figured that the best way to do this is to use the built-in uh question choice table which interestingly enough you know if you create one of these list collector fields you don't have visibility to it but if you use other field types you do so um first of all um let me show you what i'm talking about so if you do a as a lookup selector actually select a select box and uh let me just do this as a temporary variable here because we're not going to keep this so you go ahead and submit a select box type variable once the form reloads you're going to see here at the bottom you have that you're provided with the ability to add custom question choice answers to the select block list list so i could do you know choice one plus two etc right so then you know when this when this manifests itself on your catalog item you will see those choices in your drop down now uh unfortunately you know what you you don't get presented with this related list option to create these choices when you're using a list collector type because it's expecting you again to target a table and it derives its uh it's its uh records from that table so but what i actually want to do is is i want to use this question choice table to hold the answers that i want to to show from my list collector variable so to do that what i'm going to do is i'll leave this window open here which is showing me giving me access to this question choices table and then i'll go in and i'll define my list collector variable to target that choice collection table so let me do that now so we'll do a list collector and we're going to set our question up to be just for for demo purposes here we will ask the question what is your data categorization so let's say we're like collecting uh we're trying to give some approval or something for certain type of data that we're sharing so uh we will call this data category and ask that question what is your data categorization and our type specification actually i'm just going to zoom in a little bit make sure that you can see what i'm doing so our type specification here the table that we're going to target is going to be our question choice table and that's this top one here okay and then for uh the reference qualifier what we're going to do is we're going to have a question question equals and we're going to use the cis id of this variable that we're in the process of creating so we say question equals this variable so let's go ahead and submit this so now we have that variable created here but what you'll notice is that you know we don't have a related list of the questions that we can specify or the answers that we can specify for this question like we did in our temp variable here where you can see that at the bottom of question choices we don't have that experience here but what we can do now that you know i targeted the same question choice tables i can go now to the list view that i had open directly to the question choice table and right here from the list view i can add my uh choices that i want to provide for this question and so all i got to do here is override this question with the new one i just created what is your data categorizations and then i can uh start defining the choices that i want to expose to that for answers to that question so we'll do we'll do public as a type of data and we'll make this the first choice we'll do 100 price is not applicable here what we're doing do save and then also do confidential as a type of data we'll have that be the second choice do an insert and stay and then finally we'll do restricted as a third choice and do insert and stay okay so uh we now have if we go back back right back back back to the question choice table and of course uh know we're seeing a lot of things what are all the stuff that's in here right now but let's zero in on this question that we care about oops let me just jump back real quick to here and grab my question name come back here paste that in there we go and do run so we can now see in a separate list view view here we can see this uh our list of questions you know and what you can do is you can sort of add this uh as a left nav link uh query to to your left navigator so that you have a place you can go to administer and add new choices or remove the existing ones or modify them so now with all that set up let's go ahead and just quickly test out this catalog item so i'm going to copy this this id real quick i'm going to go to the platform view and then i will modify the url to do sp for the service portal [Music] alright so from here i'm just going to go into the service catalog open up any random item and then i will just override the sys id in the url to target the item that i'm working on so here's my test item here you can see there's this attempt temp drop down here with the choice but then here's the list collector that i set up and now you can see uh we have controls are confidential public and restricted so now you notice that actually these are in a out of order here there's actually a variable attribute you can add off top my head i don't remember what that is but you can look it up in the documentation to control to specify which field in the target table you want to use to order your choices and so this you can you can implement that that that attribute on the item and then it will render according you can uh specify the order field uh to render that appropriately so let's see now now that we have our list collector here so the next requirement that was given was that you know yeah so we need to be able to select one or many um options in this choice but then when we do we need to be able to provide additional specific details about each one of these uh respectively and not like as a whole under normal circumstances you might just expose a multi-line string input field below this to just collect additional information but in this case they need to they need to call it out per so what i had thought to do is let's go ahead and create next is a variable set but we're going to create a multi-row variable set so let's do this and we're going to name it similar to what we named our data category here so this variable set um okay so we need to click here and click new um because this is actually a an intermediate many-to-many table here so i'm going to do a multi-role variable set click add and the title of that i'll just give data category detail as the title copy that actually that's going to be my internal name and i'll make the title a little nicer so we'll call it data category detail with spaces and capitals all right and then go ahead and submit this guy for now okay and then i'll submit here so i now have uh defined against this catalog item this variable set data category detail i need to open that up and actually specify the variables that we're going to have within this variable set says multirow variable set so i want to create two variables one of them we'll call let's see data type which is going to correspond to the selection they made in the list collector so this this will be data type and data type and the the type of variable we're going to use in this case is actually going to be a reference variable and then we're going to be targeting our same uh question choice table here question choice just like this and then from here we're going to want to apply a reference qualifier condition where our question in the question choice table is equal to the question that we are are working on here for our primary uh variable what is your data so this is the question that's associated or uh this is referring to the list collector variable that particular question so we come back to here to this reference qualifier we can specify that all right so that is set and let's go ahead and submit this as is okay so that's one variable in our variable set and our second variable in our variable set is where we're going to is what we're going to use to collect that additional information right so what we need in addition to the data type is we need them to provide us with a a list of data elements so this is just this we're just going to create as a string input field so we'll just call it data element elements plural okay and this is going to be we'll just do single line text now you can make this multi-line text as well if you expect there's going to be a large number i think in this particular case single line text should be sufficient and we'll order this as the second variable in this variable set so let me go ahead and hit submit and actually in this case and in both of these variables in this variable set we do want to make them mandatory so let me go ahead and submit this let me go back and modify this first variable the data type variable make that mandatory okay so now we have our variable set set up with uh two mandatory variables in it uh and we actually want to render this after the um the list collector let me remove our select box because we don't need that anymore that was just to show you how they render the question choices and then i'm going to update the order for the list collector i'll put that at 100 i will put the variable set at 200 okay let's do this so now let's take a look at our item so far and see what that looks like all right so let's refresh here reload all right so what we have here now is our list collector of course right very good and then we have our new um multirow variable set down here which if you've never used this if you just click the add button this will allow you to select from those three options that we had above and then provide our list of data elements for example name and add that that's cool uh that's nice but uh what we want to do here actually is is we want to have the system automatically tie these two variables together and take care of as we're making these list collector selections automatically adding those selections to this variable set list down here as dedicated rows obviously with the data elements not populated because that's what needs to be provided by the requester who's going to be submitting this form so that's our next step so let me see here so we'll go back into studio and under the catalog item we'll want to go ahead and create a couple of catalog client scripts to control this behavior so the first one we'll create is we'll will be responsible for hiding and showing the variable set on demand as needed and i already went ahead and wrote this code so i'll just do copy paste you don't have to watch me type it in so here's a hide free uh and we're gonna change this to our field type so we'll say data um what do you call it data category detail we already got that right there so we're going to hide the data category details right and uh so we'll need to make let's zoom in a little bit here so you can see when i see the code and i'll walk you through this so we're going to need to make a couple changes in this code here specifically we need to change the targets variable set id value so this that's what this is here this is going to be controlling the visibility of the rendering of this variable set table multirow table down here so to do that we need to get the um the internal name of that variable set which if you remember when we were creating it see the variable set internal name is right here which we have defined as data category detail so i'm going to copy that out and then replace this in the script here with data category detail all right so now that we've updated that we're going to call this we already got the name set so let's go ahead and take this is going to be an on change uh client script as well so we'll go back here we're going to change set the type to on change and we're going to be targeting that data category list collect variable i'm going to apply it to all all uh things here our catalog requested items and catalog tasks and then the ui type i'm going to select all to make sure it works in the service portal as well as on the desktop then i'll just replace this code here with what i copied from my script editor and so now we should be all set here um actually yeah so so one of the things that i that we could add here now and we'll come back to this right now i'll just leave it there because it's not going to make it any different but i'll come back to this code in a minute to enhance this a little bit later to uh to maybe uh ignore certain selections for example so let's go ahead and save this all right so now this should be running on change notice also i have commented out the return when it's loading because we wanted to actually hide um the um variable set uh on load as well as on change so if you didn't know the um an on change type of catalog client script as well as as well as regular client scripts um you can handle the loading state during uh with one of those functions as well because it actually gets triggered when the form is initially loaded as well as whenever the target field in question is actively changed or not so uh we want this this script down here to evaluate in both use cases so essentially what we're doing is we're using the g form get value to grab the the target uh multirow variable set by internal id we're then checking that value to see if it is uh not equal to undefined uh or if it's if it's not equal to empty then we want to show it we want to go ahead and set the display to true otherwise if it's undefined or empty we're going to hide it so we'll set display to false okay so that's the the gist of that so with that in place now we should be able to test that out so if we refresh this reload now it is now hidden right and if i select it's still hidden and so in the current state of things we can't unhide it because we have no way of populating data into that table but that's going to change so our next step here is we want to create another catalog client script so let me just refresh that and click new so our next client script is going to be responsible for actually setting the details are setting the values in the details as the list collector is updated so we will call this set data categories details all right and again we want this to be of type on change targeting the same field the list collector field of data category apply against all and set the ui type to all okay so now let me go in here so it looks like we need to so this one i've kind of uh made a little easier here um where i have some variables at the top all i've got to do is change these variables so the target field name this is the target variable or field that exists within the variable set that's going to be essentially synchronized with the list collector value so in this case we called our field i think it was data type if i'm not mistaken let me just confirm real quick so in our variable set yes we have data type field so this is the reference to the choice uh the question choice record that is being um also referenced by the list collector okay so we want to set that as our target field and then our target variable set again it's going to be data category detail so i will replace that there and then this we're not using at present i'll come back to that so um so that should be all that's needed here for this unchanged class script so now let me go ahead and copy paste this into the body of our script here okay go ahead and hit save on this and then um i will demo this for you now and you'll see how it works and then i'll go through line by line what that script is doing so reload so now we come in here we select one of these options like public look at that it's magic so now it uh it's programmatically inserting a new row into our multi-row variable set table uh that that is setting the reference to the same value that we selected up in the list collector so we can select multiple we can select for confidential we can select for restricted you can see those are automatically added to the table below and then if we remove a confidential uh look at that it removes it public we don't want any more so we got dynamic interaction between these two variables it's pretty nice huh so with this uh you know uh you may have a use case and i had this where perhaps you want uh this interaction between these two fields to be applicable only with certain selected values let's say that for confidential and restricted we definitely want them to provide the data element but maybe we don't care as much for public so when public selected we don't want that we don't want that to show as a row down below so in that case what we can do is let's go to our list of questions i think i still have this open here's our list of three questions and let's grab the sys id of this public question here so let me just right click on this row copy sys id and then jump back to the code that i had real quick and uh let me replace uh for both these actually let it go through the studio here so let's go back to our client script the first one that hides the data category details so we don't want to show it when that particular choice is selected so i'm going to override the sys id that you see here inside of an array so what this is saying here is basically if the value of what is in our data category detail variable set if it looks like this which is essentially saying if it's an array that contains just this one value which is that public value sys id then you know um we don't want to show it so this is a is it's not equal to that then we don't want to show it because we're not going to be uh adding a row for that value so if the array looks like that it only has one entry and that one entry is public then we don't want to show that right so let's go ahead and try that first and and hit save um is it we'll update that and then the other thing we need to update is in our other client script there is that other variable i i had at the top here i said i'd come back to you so this is the same thing so if we replace the this this id with the public uh choice the sysid and then save this record we should now see the behavior reflecting what we're what our goal is here which is essentially if i select just public nothing happens there is no uh you know the table's not rendered because that value is no longer being added but if i select confidential and or restricted those are added now so so public has no bearing on that table now in this case so we're able to exclude that from the synchronization logic so that that's a cool enhancement now let me go in a little more detail on the script that's that's controlling uh the synchronization between this and that's primarily this uh the second uh client script that i had implemented here so i'll go through this a little by little so we set up three variables at the beginning so we got the target field which is our data type field in the variable set that's going to be our reference field that aligns with the reference that's used on the list collector and then we have our target variable set name and then and then that one record that we wanted to ignore so the first thing we do is uh and i'll just say as a disclaimer here this is functioning code it it is very likely that it could be uh improved and enhanced as far as uh readability and performance so i'll just throw that out right there uh right now so anyhow um checking uh the new value if it's empty or if the new values is only equal to that uh that public value or that that one choice then we want to hide we want to essentially oh i'm sorry not high but this is controlling the value that's being set in the variable set so we want to do a set value on the variable set name and then we want to set it to an empty array because this is how a multi-row variable set uh store their values they store it as an array of sys ids that is uh oh actually i'm sorry it's it's an array of json objects to be uh specific json object in a structure that matches the fields that you have inside of your multi-row variable set for example if uh if i wanted to programmatically set the value of that multirole variable set to um uh to set the the first um field to the value of public for example which is the one we actually excluded um we would want to provide a an array here that says you know our target field name is uh data type so it would it would look like this data type so that's your field name and then you'd have a colon and then the value and the value in this case if we were using that public one would be the cis idea of that public choice record so if we set um and we took this uh here and and set this as the value to our multi-row variable set then you would see a row rendered with just that one field populated now if you wanted to programmatically populate the description field uh if you had that data in advance then you know uh you would uh add that here as well actually i don't think we called it description we called it uh let's see what we call it it was data elements right so if you wanted to populate that maybe you had access in advance to those to some of the data elements information you could do it like this and you can provide you know some of those or you know that every one of these uh is going to have a name right so you could just pre-populate that as well so this is how you would essentially specify a value for a multi-role variable set so what i'm doing here is just supplying an empty array to clear out the value because if if our we're basically our new value here is representing the value that is in our field that we're watching for changes and that is our list collector field so from the list collector if we see you know nothing's there or maybe just the public choices there we don't want to set the value on the multi-row variable set so we're setting an empty array else uh if there is a value there and it's not that one then we want to do some fancy stuff here so we're going to get the current value because here's the thing if you if you just we could simply do a straight g form set value and push in the values of everything in that variable set i'm sorry in the list collector into the variable set um but if we did that every time there was a change the list collector it would overwrite any customization so we need to retain whatever is currently there so that's what the bulk of this logic is doing down here so we're getting our current variable set by name we're defining an empty json array we're going to parse the current value of what's in that variable set into that json array then we're going to show the table we're going to make it visible then we're going to parse the choices from the new value field because the list collector is a comma separated list of sys ids of the of all the choices you selected in that list collector so this is going to now be an array of all the choices that are currently exist in the list list collector field we're going to iterate over each one of those choices here and uh what we're going to do for each choice is uh we're going to check whether or not that choice is currently in our parsed json array object so we're going to iterate over the properties of that and we're going to check on the each json array element to check the target field which we defined as data type to see if it is equal to our current parsed choice choice if it is then we say oh yes that is in the array so we set that to true and then after iterating over all the um properties of that json array we will check to say uh is you know we're going to add the choice to the array if it's not in the array so again we're going to we're going to also do a secondary check here to say uh you know make sure that as long as this choice is not that one that we're filtering out then go ahead and we're constructing an object string a json string by hand here so we're we're starting the object here we're escaping our double quote we're going to substitute in the target field name again which is data type data underscore type we're going to um close off that uh double that quotation we're going to add our colon here oops that i'm going to do another quote mark and then we're going to put in our parsed choice value and then we're going to terminate that and stop stop that line and then what we'll do is once we have that string built we're going to do a json.parse to convert it to a json object and we're going to put it push that into our json array object here okay so we're building this i would say we're adding to the existing json array that we object that we parsed from the um the current state of the variable set so we get the current state of the variable set here then we're going to push into that same object a new row which represents the choices that currently do not exist in that array then the last thing we need to do is we actually need to remove the choices from the adjacent array that no longer exist in the list collector and that's what this bit of code is for down here so to do that i essentially instantiate a new json array here and then i iterate over the existing json array which includes our additions and what was currently in the variable set so i'm iterating over that uh checking each one of those elements and then for each of the parse choices that i'm working with i'm doing another comparison here we're going to check to see is is our is our current list of parts choices uh in the array or not and uh so we we iterate over and we look for each of the json array properties we make sure that it's not null that um and then that the field here is not null and then we're going to check for uh to parse we're going to check the string value of our parsed choice that we're looking at the specific choice and we're going to say if it equals the json arrays element target field value then it is indeed in the array we're done checking for that we can break out of that loop um and then if it is in the array we skip because we don't want to uh add this to the new array right oh i'm sorry if it is not in the array and this is this is actually the key part right here because this is what's going to remove the the element so we basically see if that element is not in the array after having iterated over all the elements in the array and checking for that data value if it's not found then we're going to skip we're going to do nothing essentially if it is found then we're going to go ahead and push it into the new array so at the end we're essentially going to have a new json array populated with just the rows that uh correspond to what's left or what's existing in that list collector field and then at the end we're just i'm just checking the array length to see that is greater than zero and you know if it is then i'm going to go ahead and push the value into the array by and it's it's taking you know the set value on the g form expects a string input so you have to use a json.stringify of the object so i'm taking that new json object array which has the new elements and the removed elements updated and pushing that as a string to the target variable set field and then at the end i'm i'm going to get the target variable set again and i'm going to make sure it's not undefined make sure it's not empty make sure it's not just an array and then if it's none of those then i will set it as a mandatory field because when that table is shown i do want that to be forced as mandatory so that's the that's the bulk of the code there now you can uh take a look at this code i'm going to go ahead and publish our deploy this to source code control and i'll leave that link on this video as well so you can take a look at that so that that's basically uh the logic behind that script so now with all of that in place just to demo one more time let me just go ahead and refresh this reload so we've got ourselves a nice multi-selecting list collector field that is ignoring public but when we provide confidential or restricted it will automatically insert those records for us then your user can come in and they can do their edit they can add you know the the information that they want to have restrict you know confidential maybe a home phone is one of the fields that would be confidential um you know marital status for example and then uh here for restricted maybe we have you know social security number or something like that so this would be um how that works and then you know if we say oh you know what uh we actually don't want confidential that you know we're not going to include those those data elements at all anyways i can just remove that and it'll remove it from there and still retain our restricted so that there you go there you have it that's what i recently built and i thought i'd share here in this video um if you have any questions or feedback please feel free to leave it and i hope you enjoyed this video and it was useful and take care thank you for watching