Are you API about ServiceDesk Plus – Part 3?

21 July 2016
by Nigel Arnold

**** This entire article now available as a white paper for download here >> ****

It’s potentially possible to write your own workflow for ServiceDesk Plus using external scripts to interact with the ServiceDesk Plus API. There are various scripting languages we could use but, for simplicity, I’m going to use Microsoft PowerShell. PowerShell is widely recognised and should be readily available on Windows servers running ServiceDesk Plus.

In order to run PowerShell scripts on your Windows server it may be necessary to change the default PowerShell script execution policy. The Set-ExecutionPolicy cmdlet enables you to determine which Windows PowerShell scripts (if any) will be allowed to run on your computer. To execute search for the PowerShell application on your windows system:

APIPart3_1

Right-click ‘Windows PowerShell’ and choose the ‘Run as administrator’ option to bring up the PowerShell command line. Then enter the command ‘set-executionpolicy unrestricted’; you will be asked to accept the policy change by typing ‘Y’ as shown below:

APIPart3_2

You can always use a basic text editor to generate a PowerShell script but running the Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) can be very useful as it provides a means to easily write, test and debug PowerShell scripts:

When you write a script it is important to locate the file in the correct folder location on the ServiceDesk Plus server. Generally the best place to store them is in,

[ServiceDesk Plus Home Folder]integrationcustom_scripts

If you return to this folder after running some scripts you may notice some additional folders such as ‘Request’. These folders are used to temporarily store any data output from ServiceDesk Plus.

So how do we make an API call to ServiceDesk Plus via a script? If you copy the following code to a script pane in your PowerShell ISE you should be able to run the script with the ‘Play’ button and see the formatted output – note that you’ll have to replace the details of the TECHNICIAN_KEY and RequestID (as shown in red) with values relevant to your own ServiceDesk Plus system (for a reminder see Part 2):

# Powershell HTTP Request

$url =”http://localhost:8888/sdpapi/request/493?TECHNICIAN_KEY=F3DC7E96-56D5-4839-9071-F9A6371241F1&OPERATION_NAME=GET_REQUEST”
$result = (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(“$url”);
write-host $result

If everything has gone according to plan you should see your request output in the console panel:

Thanks for sticking with it and next time we’ll step through a real example.

Enjoy!

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