this episode is brought to you by sacon which is on my list of apps with the most potential for game-changing savings talk to your organization's mobility manager and they'll tell you the nightmare of managing multiple carriers per country each with their own offerings contracts and integrations sake sakon abstracts and manages this for you eliminating the swivel chair mobility management work and giving you asset and configuration data you can trust sakon is mobility managed check the description below hey everyone welcome to another servicenow toolbox i'm robert fedoric it is so good to have you here today we are going to talk about journal fields and before we do i just want to have a quick shout out to joel olives and john dahl who really helped me hone my knowledge in this area so big shout out to you guys their profiles will be in the description below now journal fields are awesome because it allows us to put a more nuanced history into our tickets than just the changing of the field values now the most obvious example of journal fields are the work notes and comments fields we've been used to using in tasks for ages and if you're going to be doing any kind of application development on service now it's important to know how these work so in this video we're going to talk about the prerequisites to using journal fields then we're going to talk about the three types of journal fields and why those distinctions matter we're going to be doing this in the context of contract management because seriously contract management doesn't have journal fields before we add journal fields we have to make sure that auditing is on for the tables where we want the fields if you've never done this before you have to go to the dictionary and find the collection record for that table that will be the record that has no column name once you've opened that record just set audit to true and save now i mentioned there's three types of journal fields and the first type of journal field is called a journal a field of type journal will have a string input field and a list of entries to that field displayed below watch this example this is handy when all you want is a history of information from that field along with the way to enter that history close at hand but there's two other options the second type of journal field is a journal input field on a brand new record this looks almost exactly like the journal field but once you try to start entering data the difference becomes obvious here i am entering data into the two journal input fields but where's the journal info going now why would i want a journal field that doesn't display its own journal entries the answer is actually shockingly simple because with activity log we already have a kind of journal dumping ground you can add the journal input fields to the activity log if you've never done this before you click the funnel beside activity log then click the configure available fields option then click the name of your input fields i have two of them and so i'm adding those now and now we see the journal entries that i was making from the journal input fields in the activity log so if you're already using activity log and you want new fields to journal into journal input might be the field type you're looking for but there's one other possibility as well what if i wanted a place to enter journal information but a separate place in order to view it this might come about if you have one role that's entering journal information into the record and a separate role that is able to view but not enter data into the journal perhaps even on different form views enter the journal list option and this is a little bit more complicated than the previous two because you have to set up dependency here we are on the dictionary definition for a journal list column you'll also notice that i'm in the advanced view because i have access to the dependency tab all we need to do is set dependency and then pick a journal or journal input field for this journal list to be dependent on i'm going to pick journal input 1. now let's take a look at our journal list on the form and it too is displaying the entries i was making to the journal input fields okay special bonus you may have noticed that i had two journal input fields and wouldn't it be cool if both of those journal input fields output to the journal list field in fact back in 1912 that's exactly how work notes and comments worked so we're going to go to the dictionary and look for journal input fields on the task table here we have the work notes and comments field that i was just mentioning and we pull it up and you'll notice that the dependency is a string that just lists the fields it is dependent on now when i pull up the dictionary entry for my journal list field i can't find a way to get that dependency string so we should probably give up right i didn't have time or energy to figure out how to get access to that string without modifying the dictionary form so instead i went to a list view i customized the list view so that it showed the dependency column and i took my string of comma delimited fields that i wanted the journal input to be dependent on and i just pasted it into that cell i love list view editing now let's go back to our form see what our journal list is displaying and you see that it is displaying entries from both the journal input 1 and the journal input 2 fields [Music] there's an interesting bug you can sometimes come across if you're not careful this bug only manifests if you have the journal and the activity log in the same form section and you are also tracking the journal in the activity log what happens then is that the entries to the journal are stacked above the journal input field instead of below it it's annoying but you really should be judicious about where you're displaying the journal entries anyway i can't see a situation where i need to have the journal entries displayed twice in the same form section and there you have it folks everything you need to know about journal entries and remember setting up servicenow toolbox before even film can be an exercise measured in hours now that i've secured sponsorships i'm willing to share the bulk of that sponsorship money for help prepping my instances and coming up with scripts for new shows so if you're interested in doing that making a little bit of money on the side hit me up at this email here and i look forward to hearing from you if you're a servicenow expert looking for better opportunities but maybe your resume or linkedin profile isn't doing you justice reach out to me via linkedin or the email pictured here as i offer both career coaching and recruitment services and if you're a servicenow customer or partner you heard that right robert fedoric now does servicenow recruiting with a 1 500 subscriber youtube channel and mailing list and thousands of linkedin followers let's make sure your open positions get first go with the prodigious pool of servicenow resources reach out via the emailed picture here you