Today I want to introduce you to a small, but very useful ServiceNow plugin: WebKit HTML to PDF. The name is not very meaningful, so I want to tell you something about this plugin.
The plugin WebKit HTML to PDF is used to provide users the ability to export homepages and dashboards as PDF documents. This is a very useful tool for your daily work. But keep in mind, that this is only an extract and will not be updated, unlike homepages or dashboards.
Note: When you activate this plugin, OAuth 2.0 will be activated as well if not already installed.
ID: com.snc.whtp
Price: Free
Producer: ServiceNow
Roles required
admin
It’s very simple to activate this plugin. I’ll explain what functions the plugin offers and how it is activated.
Before the plugin is actived, lets view the homepage. The homepage (dashboards as well) do not offer any functions to export the visible information to PDF.
Let’s activate the plugin. Plugins are listed in the System Definitions -> Plugins module. In the content frame, search for ‘WebKit HTML to PDF’. Now you can simply klick on Install to install this plugin.
Before the plugin will be installed, you’ll receive a prompt to finally activate the plugin. Dependent plugins are also shown. For the WebKit HTML to PDF the dependent plugin OAuth 2.0 is necessary and will be automatically activated.
After you clicked on activate, the plugin will be installed.
Please be careful, activating a plugin can affect performance to your inctance, so I recommend to activate the plugin outside the business hours in order not to impair other users of the systemt.
The activation is finished in a short time. You have the ability to view the activation log, plugin list or simply close & reload the form to use the functions of the plugin.
In the Plugin Application Logs, the changes are listed which are made to install the plugin.
After the installation is completed and the whole website has been refreshed, you can go back to your default landing page and you’ll note a new icon in the banner of the content frame of homepages and dashboards. When you click on this icon, a pop up appears.
The popup ‘Export to PDF’ offers the possibility to define certain frame criteria.
You can devine the Orientation of the export, portrait or landscape. Also the paper size and zoom factor can be set.
A very nice feature is, you can decide between directly generate and download the PDF, or send the PDF export by email to specified recipients.
When you select the option to generate the PDF right now, after a few seconds when the export has completed, the PDF can be downloaded.
The exported and downloaded PDF file, is shown in the image below for the ITIL Homepage. It’s generated as a letter sized file and all information at the time of export are visible.
The activation of this plugin has no impact to your instance, it only provides you the ability to simply export dashboards and homepages to PDF.
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