Determining whether a record was created from a desktop or mobile device in ServiceNow

I was working on a requirement where I needed to know if the record was created from a mobile or desktop, So, I thought to experiment a bit with JavaScript navigator methods to detect whether the records were being created from mobile or desktop and figure that ServiceNow had a method from the GlideSystem class to accomplish this. The GlideSystem provides several useful methods to get information about the system, the user who is currently logged in to the system, and date and time functions. Although the script will only work for newly created records, it was good enough to know about this method for future use.

So, now, the isMobile() method.

First, we create a new field in the incident table, called “u_source” choice list, with two options; “Mobile” and “Desktop.”

Then, we create a before Business rule for the incident table that runs for every insert.

We check with gs.isMobile() whether the record got created from a mobile device. If it returns true, then we use the current object; the current object instantiates from the GlideRecord class and has access to all the fields for the record and all the GlideRecord methods. Since we just created a new field, it should be accessible using current.u_source; , in this case, we want to assign, to the field u_source, the value “Mobile” in the instance of the conditional returning true.if (gs.isMobile())
current.u_source = 'Mobile';
else
current.u_source = 'Desktop';

The complete body of the Business rule:(function executeRule(current, previous /*null when async*/ ) {
if (gs.isMobile())
current.u_source = 'Mobile';
else
current.u_source = 'Desktop';
})(current, previous);

The output, testing from desktop by creating a new incident record, the source field is set to “Desktop,” when creating an incident from the mobile device, the source field is set to “Mobile”.