[This is in progress]

Integrations 101

Follow along with me in this intro-to-integrations post! We're going to focus on REST (or Representational State Transfer) APIs in this post.

Methods

There are a few different "methods" for us to interact with data with a REST API. I'll explain how they would relate to ServiceNow records (but these methods would apply to any system). They are:

• GET -- to "read" a record
• POST -- to "create" a record
• PATCH -- to "update" a record with specific info; for example, if we just wanted to update the Short Description of a record
• PUT -- to "update" a record entirely; this basically clears out fields not mentioned in the request
• DELETE -- to "delete" a record

How we pass data

There are a few different components to a REST message. These include:

• Query parameters (often has the format of name=value)
• Path parameters (often has the format of parameter1/parameter2 and is part of the endpoint)
• Headers (usually passes authentication info)
• Request body (the actual meat and potatoes of the message; we use the methods as part of the body)

Here's an example with the first two:

instance.service-now.com/now/nav/ui/classic/params/target/incident_list.do?sysparm_query=state=1&sysparm_first_row=1

target/incident_list is the path parameter and state=1 is an example of a query parameter here.