🛠️That’s right folks, it's yet another FREE ServiceNow tool on SN Pro Tips!🔧

This one is a URL Shortener that uses the fancy-fun-fresh "snc.guru" domain, so you can look like a really heckin' hoopy frood when you share a link to your blog post, a resource you found, etc.

Create short, memorable, easy quick-links with the easy-to-remember pattern: go.snc.guru/your_thing
Start creating your own custom ServiceNow-ey short-URLs with snc.guru with just a few clicks. Head over to short.snc.guru, or click “Read more” to use what might be the world’s simplest URL shortener!

I come across this question all the time in the ServiceNow community forums, and in the ServiceNow developer community Discord, Slack, and Telegram groups.

“How do I get the last N journal entries from a record in ServiceNow, in a script?”
“How do I print the last N journal entries in my notification email or mail script in ServiceNow?”
“How do I parse journal entries for HTML so special characters and line-breaks will show up properly in HTML or an email?”

I’ve helped people create so many one-off solutions to these questions that it felt more efficient to, finally, just create a single function that can do it all!

Click below to be taken to the article, and get the free tool that you can add your instance!

Imagine you’re searching for an issue you’re researching in ServiceNow, and the first result you find on Google is a ServiceNow documentation page… from the Jakarta version of ServiceNow. It’s totally out of date.

How do you make sure that you’re getting the latest version of this same page in the documentation?
And what if you want to share the link to the latest version of that doc with someone else?
What if, for example, you’re posting to the community forums and you want to make sure that the link you post will always go to the latest version of that doc, even if someone sees the link years later?

With this extension (or bookmarklet script), you can be on any ServiceNow Docs page and simply click one button to (1) have the URL of the latest version of that article copied to your clipboard, and (2) be redirected to the latest version of that page.
The best thing about that generated link is that even if you were to navigate to it again years later, it would still take you to the latest version of that page, even if the “latest version” is newer than the version that was the latest when you generated the link!

Unfortunately, ServiceNow has made the interesting (see: baffling) decision to make it confoundingly difficult to figure out how to change the Git repo your application is associated with, once it’s been linked to one. I can’t fathom why they might’ve done this, but that is unfortunately not an unusual sentiment when it comes to ServiceNow.

Knowing that I’m liable to let this article devolve into a 10-page ranting, rambling manifesto lamenting the unnecessarily opaque and undocumented process for doing basic things like changing the repo your application is associated with, let’s instead get straight on in to how to do it anyway.

Generating an SSH Key

If you haven’t already got one set up (such as if your new repo is associated to a new Github account), you’ll need to first generate an SSH public/private key pair. This will allow your ServiceNow instance to authenticate to your your Github account and repositories.

1. Using a tool such as this one, enter a passphrase and click Generate-SSH-Keys. Save the Public and Private keys somewhere temporarily, and don't forget the passphrase! You’ll need all three of these in a bit.

2. From Github, click your profile icon and go to Settings…

Very often, we’ll find ourselves writing a custom application (whether scoped or global) that requires some “setup” by the admin who installs it. Maybe we’re writing the app to be distributed to multiple ServiceNow customers, each with their own environments and needs; or maybe the app just requires a unique setup process in each instance we promote it to. Whatever the case, I’ve often had cause to want to build my own “guided setup”.
Unfortunately, for some reason, ServiceNow has made it difficult to create a guided setup in our own development instances.
In this article, we’re going to learn how to get around those limitations; then, we’re going to learn how to build a guided setup ourselves!

Here's a Quick Pro-Tip:

If you have an application which requires some setup or initial configuration, write ATF tests specifically to validate that the application is set up properly. Add executing the tests as a final step in your application's Guided Setup, and provide some meaningful output that directs the admin to the right place(s) to fix any issues identified by the tests.

For example, I'm building an application now which connects to an outside application running on…