Natively Connect to ServiceNow Data in PHP

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for ServiceNow into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build ServiceNow-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to ServiceNow data, execute queries, and output the results.

Getting Started

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Configure a DSN

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

ServiceNow uses the OAuth 2.0 authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, register an OAuth app with ServiceNow to obtain the OAuthClientId and OAuthClientSecret connection properties. In addition to the OAuth values, specify the Instance, Username, and Password connection properties.

See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide on connecting to ServiceNow.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to ServiceNow by calling the or methods. To close connections, use or .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC ServiceNow Source","user","password");

Connections opened with are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC ServiceNow Source","user","password");
...
odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM incident WHERE category = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC ServiceNow Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM incident WHERE category = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('request'));
 

Execute nonparameterized queries with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC ServiceNow Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT sys_id, priority FROM incident");
 

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC ServiceNow data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT sys_id, priority FROM incident");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row["sys_id"] . "\n";
}

Display the result set in an HTML table with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC ServiceNow data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM incident WHERE category = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('request'));
if($success)
 odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are ServiceNow-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.