Diving in the History - Going through old versions of your records (GlideRecordRollback)

There is public API called GlideRecordRollback in ServiceNow that allows you to go through your servicenow record history. Here is a quick script illustrating how to use it.

In this example we will go back to the record history and restore user's first_name that was there before the most recent update.

var user = new GlideRecord('sys_user');

user.get('7e1671c70f43f100aada716ce1050e93'); // Getting a user GlideRecord by sys_id;

var rollBack = new GlideRecordRollback(); // Here is the Force, Luke! :)

var updateCount = user.sys_mod_count; // This is important, we get the update counter.

 rollBack.toVersion(user, updateCount-1); // We use the Force (of) NOW! We roll back one version. Now our "user" GlideRecord contains data that was in ServiceNow before the last update was taken.

var oldFirstName = user.first_name; // Got the old First Name (if it was updated there, otherwise you will get the current value)

A few considerations

• As soon as you applied "toVersion" method to your GlideRecord object you would not be able to save it using ".update()'
• This will only work with tables and fields with enabled Audit
• This is a resource consuming operation. Test it with care if you are going to apply it to thousands of records
• You can not go back to desired update number. You have to go one by one, e.g.

rollBack.toVersion(user, updateCount-1); // one update back

rollBack.toVersion(user, updateCount-2); // two updates back

rollBack.toVersion(user, updateCount-3); // three updates back