ServiceNow – Automating Bank Holidays (U.K.)

I wanted to share this potentially useful tip related to ServiceNow schedules. There might be instances when you need to use schedules, such as managing SLAs that should only trigger during work hours.

Setting up schedules is generally straightforward, but sometimes you need to exclude specific dates like bank holidays. The UK government has provided a JSON formatted list of UK bank holidays, accessible here:

https://www.api.gov.uk/gds/bank-holidays/#bank-holidays

This resource is really useful for populating bank holidays automatically. I created a new schedule, populate it with entries from the JSON data, and then referenced this schedule. If you’d like to use the same approach, here’s the script I used. You only need to replace ‘schedule_sys_id’ with the sys_id of your new schedule.

// SysID of the schedule to be updated
var schedule_sys_id = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'; 

// Create a new instance of RESTMessageV2 for HTTP requests
var request = new sn_ws.RESTMessageV2();

// Set the endpoint of the HTTP request
request.setEndpoint('https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json');

// Set the method to GET to fetch data
request.setHttpMethod('GET');

// Set the header to accept application/json
request.setRequestHeader("Accept","application/json");

// Execute the HTTP request and store the response
var response = request.execute();
gs.info('HTTP request sent to fetch bank holidays');

// Get the response body
var str = response.getBody();

// Parse the JSON string into a JavaScript object
var obj = JSON.parse(str);

// Extract the list of holidays for England and Wales
var ukHolidays = obj['england-and-wales'].events;
gs.info('Fetched ' + ukHolidays.length + ' UK bank holidays');

// Loop over each bank holiday
for (var bankHoliday in ukHolidays) {
	// Check if the current property belongs to the object itself
	if(!ukHolidays.hasOwnProperty(bankHoliday)) continue;
	
	// Extract the title, date, and notes of the bank holiday
	var title = ukHolidays[bankHoliday].title;
	var date = ukHolidays[bankHoliday].date;
	var notes = ukHolidays[bankHoliday].notes;

	// Convert the date into a GlideDateTime object
	var gdt = new GlideDateTime(date);
	
	// Query the 'cmn_schedule_span' table to check if the record already exists
	var checkFirst = new GlideRecord('cmn_schedule_span');
	checkFirst.addQuery('schedule', schedule_sys_id);
	checkFirst.addQuery('name',(title + ' - ' + gdt.getYearUTC()));
	checkFirst.query();
	
	// If the record doesn't exist, create a new one
	if (!checkFirst.hasNext()){
		var gr = new GlideRecord('cmn_schedule_span');
		gr.initialize();
		gr.schedule = schedule_sys_id;
		gr.name = (title + ' - ' + gdt.getYearUTC());
		gr.type = 'exclude';
		gr.show_as = 'busy';
		gr.all_day = true;
		gr.start_date_time = gdt.getDate().toString();
		gdt.addDays(1);
		gr.end_date_time = gdt.getDate().toString();
		gr.notes = notes;
		gr.insert();
		gs.info('Added bank holiday: ' + title + ' - ' + gdt.getYearUTC());
	} else {
		gs.warn('Bank holiday already exists in the schedule: ' + title + ' - ' + gdt.getYearUTC());
	}
}