In our support Portal, we make use of the worknotes in incident tickets. Worknotes make it possible for us to discuss an incident (inside the incident) without bothering the customer with an overload of updates. Or, without the customer knowing we are discussing….

What we needed was a method to quickly detect an update in the worknote of an incident. The easiest way to detect the update would be if it were visible in the incident list.

How did we do that?
We created a new field in the incident table, a Boolean (only two values, true or false). The field was named “u_new_worknote” , default value is False.

A simple business rule was added to the incident table. This business rule always runs, at least on update of the incident table. If the worknote fields is changed, we set the field to true. In any other case, the field is set to false.

[cc lang=”javascript”]
if (current.work_notes.changes()) {
current.u_new_worknotes = true;
} else {
current.u_new_worknotes = false;
}
[/cc]
We added a new style to the incident number, so we could notice the new worknote… This style makes use of the content of the field u_new_worknotes to decide to change the color on the list… The list is only changed if the user has a role. So, customers, who have no role at all, do not see this

Name: incident
Field: number
Value: javascript:current.u_new_worknotes == true && gs.getUser().hasRoles()

Style:
background-color: #FFFFB0;
background-image: url(‘images/icons/alert.gif’);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: 98% 5px;
padding-right: 20px;

In the image below, you see the results in the incident list:

You see, with a simple adjustment you can make ServiceNow do exactly what you want!

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