Use Moment - Js in ServiceNow - John Skender

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Use moment.js in ServiceNow

As most developers know, working with dates, time, and timezones can be one of the
most frustrating aspects of any program. ServiceNow includes some decent out of box
API’s for working with GlideDateTime objects, but often you’ll find that they aren’t quite as
robust as you’d like.
When GlideDateTime methods don’t quite cut it, we can rely on the world’s most popular
library for parsing, validating, and manipulating dates and time in javascript: Moment.js
It’s fairly quick to get started using moment.js in both client and server side code. We’ll
walk through the process of getting it installed and briefly show how you can create a
moment object from a GlideDateTime field and vice versa.
This post will be split into three parts
1. Client Installation
2. Server Installation
3. Basic Usage
UI scripts will make the library available in the client (UI policies, UI actions, Client Scripts,
etc) and Script Includes will make it available in Server code (Other Script Includes,
Business Rules, Fix Scripts, etc).
Client Side
Navigate to https://momentjs.com/downloads/moment.min.js and copy the entirety of the
minified library.
Create a new UI Script in your instance and paste the contents of the script into the script
field. You’ll need to set the following properties on the script
Global = true
UI Type = Desktop
Active = true
Name = moment
You should now have access to the moment object anywhere client side throughout the
platform.
To test this, open the javascript executor
For Mac press Ctrl+Shift+j
For Windows press Alt+Ctrl+Shift+j
In the executor window type
console.log("Todays date: " + moment().format())
then click “Run my code”

If everything was installed successfully you should see the below output in your browser’s
console.
Todays date: 2020-08-29T12:36:02-05:00
Server Side
Navigate to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jnskender/Moment-
ServiceNow/master/moment.min.js and copy the entirety of the minified library.
Create a new Script Include (sysscriptinclude) and name it “Moment”.
Delete all auto generated code from the new script include.
Paste the contents of the minified library to the script include.

To test that we’ve correctly made this available on the server open a background script
window or an xplore window.
gs.include("Moment");//makes the code available to our script
gs.print(moment().format()); //prints todays date in standard format
You should see similar output to below if the script include was successfully configured.
2020-08-29T10:57:07-07:00
Basic Usage
To show you how you can get started using moment in relation to ServiceNow, we’ll go
through a brief example of creating a moment instance from a GlideDateTime field,
modify the instance using some common moment functions, and update that field with
the modified time.
To get started open a background script window or an xplore window.
First we need to grab a record from the system that has at least one column of type
Date/Time. Change Request has one out of the box called Planned start date(start_date).
Lets grab a change that has that value populated.
var changeGR = new GlideRecord("change_request");

changeGR.addNotNullQuery("start_date");
changeGR.addLimit(1);
changeGR.query();
if (changeGR.next()) {
gs.print(changeGR.getValue("number"));
}
In this case we’re just printing out the number to make sure we have a record that meets
that condition. If you don’t, please create a change and fill out that field to meet the above
conditions.
For my change record, the initial start date looks like

Inside of your if statement we’ll then need to create a moment instance by passing in the
raw value of start date. Because ServiceNow stores date times as UTC internally, we will
need to specify to moment that we are parsing a UTC value.
var startDate = moment.utc(changeGR.getDisplayValue());
The moment library is smart enough to understand the format of GlideDateTimes display
value so we don’t need to explicitly set it.
Printing the value startDate.format() should return the moment formatted string:
2020-10-20T07:30:00-07:00
Now that we have a moment instance we can easily adjust the time to our liking using
moments built in manipulation methods such as add and subtract.
Lets add 1 day and subtract 2 hours.
startDate.add("1", "d").subtract("2", "h");

gs.print(startDate.format())//2020-10-21T05:30:00-07:007
Now if we want to actually save that new value to the change record we need to format
the value so that ServiceNow can recognize it. ServiceNow stores raw date values as UTC
in the following format "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss"
We can use moments format() method with this format to ensure we are passing the
correctly formatted value. Updating the change record would look like:
changeGR.setValue("start_date", startDate.format("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss")

changeGR.update();
If we run this script in the background we should see the UI show that Planned start has
had 1 day added and 2 hours subtracted.
The entire script should look something like
gs.include("Moment");
var changeGR = new GlideRecord("change_request");

changeGR.addNotNullQuery("start_date");
changeGR.addLimit(1);
changeGR.query();
if (changeGR.next()) {
var startDate = moment.utc(changeGR.getValue("start_date"));
startDate.add("1", "d").subtract("2", "h");
changeGR.setValue("start_date", startDate.format("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss
changeGR.update();
}
Helpful Links
Moment.js docs
GlideDateTime API docs
UI Scripts
Script Includes
Published Nov 26, 2020
Libraries
Web application developer specializing in ServiceNow.

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Use moment.js in ServiceNow

This post will be split into three parts

To test this, open the javascript executor

For Mac press Ctrl+Shift+j

For Windows press Alt+Ctrl+Shift+j

In the executor window type

console.log("Todays date: " + moment().format())

then click “Run my code”

Todays date: 2020-08-29T12:36:02-05:00

Create a new Script Include (sysscriptinclude) and name it “Moment”.

Paste the contents of the minified library to the script include.

gs.include("Moment");//makes the code available to our script

gs.print(moment().format()); //prints todays date in standard format

To get started open a background script window or an xplore window.

var changeGR = new GlideRecord("change_request");

For my change record, the initial start date looks like

var startDate = moment.utc(changeGR.getDisplayValue());

Lets add 1 day and subtract 2 hours.

startDate.add("1", "d").subtract("2", "h");

changeGR.setValue("start_date", startDate.format("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss")

var changeGR = new GlideRecord("change_request");

GlideDateTime API docs

Published Nov 26, 2020

Web application developer specializing in ServiceNow.

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