Scoped Apps, the good, bad and ugly

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I’ve talked with many developers and scoped app development adoption isn’t very high, and it’s pretty understandable since there usually isn’t a good reason to switch for smaller deployments.

I’ve been developing in Scoped Apps for a year straight now, and help support over 250 scoped apps deployed. I feel like I’ve seen just about everything I’ve needed to see.

Note: At the time of writing this I am on a London Patch 7 instance.

The Good

  1. It scales really well. If you have a lot of developers, there is no way giving all of them admin is practical, so scoped apps is a good cop out. You can just keep making new scoped apps as new ideas and developers come up.

  2. It’s pretty encapsulated. If I want my Script include to not be called by other scopes, I can restrict it. It’s pretty hard to really mess up the system by developing in a scoped app. This makes instance administrators and users happy.

  3. Studio is the best thing since sliced bread. Code search, app file list, and freakin tabs! I don’t think I want to go back to global development after using this. It’s as close to an IDE as we are probably going to get in ServiceNow, and I like the direction.

The Bad

  1. Scoped Apps don’t track deletes. This is by design from ServiceNow, so store apps can’t delete other files in your instance. Thankfully you can work around this by doing scoped update sets for deletes, or by doing an uninstall and reinstall of the app. But it isn’t ideal at all.

  2. Scoped Server Side APIs suck. If I had a nickel for every time I copied some global code and tried to run it in a scoped app and it said ‘Method does not exist’ or ‘Scoped Access Error’ I wouldn’t still be working on ServiceNow. Thankfully there are again workarounds exposing a global script include, and calling REST APIs to cross scope. I’m talking about APIs like GlideEncrypter used to decrypt credentials.

  3. That Application Manager interface is crazy buggy. I’m talking about that page you use to install and update scoped apps (and store apps). The search works after the 3rd or 4th time, and the refresh and loading is broken. It was at least bearable pre-London, but has gotten worse with the overhaul. Maybe it’s less buggy if you only have like 5 apps.

  4. The Manage Developers option needs a scroll bar…. and support for search people with the same name. Just in general the implementation of the manage developers interface is bad. If you want to add more than 8 people, or like someone who’s name is John Smith, you can’t pick the right one (without modifying that user’s name to like John Smith1, and reloading).

  5. The Create Application File is not complete. There are certain types that just don’t show up under the application file create option, and other things that don’t even show up in the app list as files in your app. This is pretty annoying whenever they come up. Thankfully they at least got most of the big things.

The Ugly

  1. For Scoped Catalog Item workflows Uninstall/Reinstall (to fix tracked deletes) breaks all active contexts. And once the old contexts are deleted there is basically no good way to get them back due to the complex workflow relationships. Except doing a full instance back-up.

  2. Scoped Restrictions isn’t really built out. You can’t lock down a table to not have like a business rule created on it from another scope. You can’t select what scopes to white-list and other ones to block. This makes security really difficult because it is all or nothing.

  3. ServiceNow doesn’t treat delegated developers as developers. They took away the ability to make update sets with the London release from delegated developers. Additionally Scoped App developers can’t actually update ACLs even the ones in their scope. When we raised a HI ticket and asked, the answer was that they needed security_admin. Yeah that isn’t gonna fly. Scoped App developers should effectively be admins in their app.