In an international system for the operation and maintenance of cloud services with project members in Hungary, Germany, Spain and India, I was in the role of a product owner for the customer portal.
In this role I was responsible for the creation, planning and communication of the UI related stories of the portal with the other involved product owners, stakeholders, development, maintenance team and test responsibles and milestone demonstrations to key users.
Technolgies:
Direct Table WebService
A direct web service is available for any table in the system if you configure the correct access control.
The whole table can be exposed over a URL & Perform database operations directly on tables.
Form Views to Limit/Extend Query Response and ACL controls can be provided.
Supported by SOAP / REST / JSONv2 API (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE — HTTP methods).
This can be implemented Asynchronous with the help of client side SOAP libraries in C# & Java but this completely depends on client tech)
Basic Authentication / Cookie based tokens to avoid multiple sessions.
For tables not required complex transformation logic & Access any table without having to configure an endpoint.
Support JSONv2, CSV, Excel, XML, PDF, and RSS as output formats.
Scripted Web Service
Custom Web-service interface.
Ability to define Input and output data structures / parameters. (no of records etc…) with JavaScript.
- Arbitrary URL end point can be defined.
- SOAP only
- Synchronous
- Validate, Transform, Enrich and handle any complex logic with scripts.
- Complex business processes spanned across multiple tables can be handled.
- Powerful & Performance oriented.
- Secured and easy to control the access.
ImportSets Approach
Web Service Import Sets provide a web service interface to import set tables. This type of web service will transform the incoming data synchronously based on the associated transform maps by default.
The Import Set API provides a REST interface for import set tables.
SOAP & REST & JSONv2
- Transform map will transforms the data and inserts/updates the target table (Incident, Change etc…)
- Access Control & No direct expose of SN — system tables
- Complex transformation logic can be implemented with scripts.
- Flexible to enrich the incoming data (ex: CIs, Incident data reference)
- Data can be inserted/updated to multiple tables with scripts. (third-party specific, audit etc…)
- Synchronous / Asynchronous
- Support JSON, CSV, Excel, and XML as input formats.
- ECC Queue
By the name says, it’s a queue based (actually a table acts like a queue).
- Inbound and outbound
- Asynchronous
- Supported with SOAP, REST and JSONv2 APIs
- Business Rules can trigger on this queue to fire the events or SOAP or REST
- Messages (outbound) to update client systems
- MID Server (small java agents) can be used if you have the external system behind the firewalls.
- Payload can be arbitrary (JSON, XML, CSV, text)
JSONv2
The JSONv2 web service is provided by a platform-level processor similar to the services for SOAP.
Having the JSON object available as a data format for web services means that we can create (insert), update, and query any data in ServiceNow platform using the JSON object format, and get results in the JSON object format.