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Getting used to some basic terminology

Lotta new vocab words to learn. Here's a bit of a glossary. Terms are notated in the code styling because it looks cooler that way.

Front End

The user-friendly web page that the requestor will interact with. You may also hear this referred to as the “portal”.

Note: You may see me use the spelling 'front-end' interchangeably...

Back End

The (also user-friendly) fulfiller and "elevated privileges" perspective. The back end is where everything you interact with is configured. System administrators and developers will architect the solution from the back end. Fulfillers will also use some view of the back end; this is the main way they interact with the system.

Note: You may see me use the spelling 'back-end' interchangeably...

Out of the Box (OOTB)

A term to indicate that a component comes pre-built in ServiceNow, by ServiceNow. In other words, it does not need to be "custom built." The building blocks of a scalable solution (meaning, one that can hold more data and is automatically "protected" and "considered" in future ServiceNow version updates) are made from OOTB components. Successful organizations will try to customize ServiceNow systems as little as possible (you may hear this referred to as configuration not customization). When ServiceNow fixes bugs and releases new features, it continues to provide support for its old functionality. Thus, if we build something custom, we run a greater risk of it malfunctioning when newer ServiceNow versions come out.

Table

The storage location for data. For example, there is a User [sys_user] table, which stores usernames, first names, last names, emails, passwords, etc.

Record

A singular row in the table. In the User [sys_user] table, this would be a person. Like Jackson Cummings. Or Abraham Lincoln. Each person has their own user record.

Wait... what the hell does [sys_user] mean

The fact that I'm using the code tags for all of these vocab terms is definitely not going to help me when I'm explaining this "term." If you see a bold word followed by a bracketed word in this post, it simply means I am providing the display name and the technical name of the table. So [sys_user] is the technical name for the table User. Hence, User [sys_user]. Another example would be Incident [incident] (the Incident table, which holds Incident records).

Filter navigator

This is the menu you interact with to open tables and pages in the back-end. You can search for keywords in here. You can also configure Favorites to "bookmark" pages you access. There is a History pane which contains the last couple pages you accessed.

Related: Common notation

If you see someone type text in the notation All > User Administration > Departments, they are providing you with a navigational path. That statement indicates that you should browse through the All folder, then the User Administration folder, and then click on Departments in your Filter navigator.

Form View / Record View

In the back-end, the page displaying a specific record in a table. For example, if we could look at Jackson Cummings' individual record on the User [sys_user] table. What we're looking at is called the form view or record view.

List view / Table view

In the back-end, the page displaying all of the records in a table. For example, instead of looking at just Jackson Cummings' record individually, we could see it alongside Abraham Lincoln's, Joe Shmo's, and Tony Soprano's.

Filters / Filtering

I don't know how to describe this word without using it, so I'll give an example. You have 10 users on the User [sys_user] table. You only want to see users with the first name Jackson. So you apply a filter onto your list to remove other users from your view. Voila. Filter.

Column / Field

So every table can have multiple rows - AKA, multiple records. Each record has its own set of fields (sorry to use the word to define the word--but bear with me). For example, on the User [sys_user] table, there is a field called First name. If we're looking at Jackson Cummings' User [sys_user] record, the field First name would have a value of Jackson. When we're looking at this data from a table view, we call fields columns. So if we were looking at the User [sys_user] table from the table view, we'd refer to First name as a column.

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Next post in the series: Table View 101