Select Page
Case Studies

All Reports need to be printed into a PDF document

The ServiceNow reports are the visualization your data that you can share with the user on dashboards and service portal, export to PDF, and send via email.

The ServiceNow system includes a range of predefined reports that provide data on application and features like incident management and service catalogue requests. You can also create your reports. Add reports on homepages and dashboards to share information across your organization.

It also schedules a report which is a convenient way to automate the distribution of reports. It can schedule a report to automate its distribution. Scheduled reports can be sent as PDF, CSV, or XLS format.

Challenges :

  • The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is to select report or reports that they want to print into a PDF document, give PDF document a name, and selected report or reports should be printed into a PDF document file with given name and store at particular location on server or available to download to those users.
  • The report scheduling in which admin user creates a schedule for different users by selecting certain number of section and reports. After the schedule ran, it should send an email to the respective users.

Solution Provided :

To print the ServiceNow reports in the PDF, there are few ways inbuilt in ServiceNow such as

  • Exporting a table record, list of records, and report into PDF.
  • The ServiceNow also has a web kit version of Home Page or Dashboard printing into PDF functionality available.
  • For developers, there is implementation of iText classes in ServiceNow, which can be used for custom PDF export process other that what is already given by ServiceNow developers.

Many other developers, who have, similar, requirements for printing such reports, passed on all of the options ServiceNow provides inbuilt. The reason behind that is those options is not sufficient and appropriate in few cases. The ServiceNow would print any report into a PDF that we required, but if there is array of reports to print in order, that is not possible to print with ServiceNow into a PDF. Other than this example, ServiceNow does not print custom reports created using UI Page Widgets, external libraries, etc.

The Dashboard Export web kit plugin can help us to export reports on any homepage or dashboard, but it is not working when that dashboard has interactive filters. It gives an error that says, “Failed to export, please try again.” Along with this, UI pages and custom reports are not on homepages or dashboards so printing those reports would need different solution. In iText implemented by ServiceNow, few people get some success while creating PDFs, but matching color, aligning contents, placing images and media gets problematic and may be because of it, Possibly, few people skipped using the iText and went looking for third party solutions.

Result

Now client just schedule report publishing section wise and its subscriber user wise. It generates PDF automatically with latest data and delivers to respective stakeholders on their time. Client don’t need to do manual work.