Reading Records Through the Table API

Almost every skill in this collection tells you to call snow_query_table. None of them tell you what comes back. Three tools read the same record from /api/now/table/{table} and return three different shapes with three different content policies, and the most-used of them reports a record total that was never counted.

Read this before you make a decision based on field content you got out of a query — especially a script body, a description, a journal entry, or a total.

The three read tools at a glance

What it does	snow_query_table	snow_record_manage (get/query)	snow_get_by_sysid
sysparm_display_value	false unless you ask	all unless you pass display_value: false	false unless you ask
Reference fields	{link, value} objects	query: {display_value, value}, no link. get: {display_value, link, value}	{link, value} objects
Every other field	plain string	{display_value, value} object	plain string
Long values	truncated at 200 chars by default	never truncated	never truncated
sys_id	always injected into sysparm_fields	only if you ask for it	not injected — absent from the record if you pass fields without it
Fields when you omit fields	all of them	a hardcoded preset subset	all of them
Record total	a guess	real, from X-Total-Count	n/a

The rest of this guide is why each cell says what it says.

snow_query_table truncates, and the marker is easy to miss

truncate_output defaults to true. With it on, every field whose value is a string longer than 200 characters is checked — nothing at or under 200 is ever touched, whatever it is called:

• If the field name contains any of template, script, server_script, client_script, css, html, xml, json, payload, body, content, description, comments, work_notes, additional_comments, close_notes, resolution_notes, instructions, short_description, long_description — it is cut at 200 characters.
• Otherwise, if the value is longer than 400 characters, it is cut at 200 anyway.
• Otherwise it comes through whole.

The first rule matches on substring, against the lowercased column name, not against the list as written — so a custom u_request_payload matches payload and a custom u_error_body matches body. The second rule has nothing to do with names at all: condition on sys_script and text on kb_knowledge are cut simply for being over 400 characters.

What you get back in place of the value:

"script": "(function executeRule(current, previous) {\n\n  // 200 characters of this... [truncated, 4823 chars total]"

Nothing is deleted or hidden — the marker is right there and it even tells you the real length. The failure is that an agent reads past it, treats the fragment as the artifact, and writes a "fixed" version of a 4823-character business rule from its first 200 characters. Every step after that reports success, and the update set contains a rule with 95% of its body gone.

When you intend to read content, turn truncation off.

// Reading a business rule to modify it
await snow_query_table({
  table: "sys_script",
  query: "name=Incident Autoclose",
  fields: ["sys_id", "name", "collection", "when", "script"],
  truncate_output: false,
})

The truncation pass only inspects strings. Reference fields arrive as objects (see below), so they are never touched whatever their size — only plain string columns are at risk.

truncated: true in the result is not a finding

The result object carries truncated, and it is a straight echo of the truncate_output argument. It says "truncation was enabled", not "something was truncated". A result with truncated: true may contain nothing that was cut, and a single ... [truncated, N chars total] inside one field is the only evidence that anything was. Grep the values, not the flag.

total and has_more from snow_query_table are guesses

snow_query_table never counts anything. It reports:

• count — real. The number of records in this response.
• total — count if the response came back short of limit; otherwise the literal string "100+", no matter what limit you asked for. Request limit: 5, get 5 rows back, and total is "100+" on a table holding exactly five records.
• has_more — true whenever the page came back full. On a table with exactly limit matching records it is true and there is nothing more.

Also note that when the page comes back short, total is the row count of this page, so with offset: 500 it under-reports the real total by 500.

Never put total in a report, a summary to the user, or a branch condition. For a real number use snow_aggregate_metrics with the same query you filtered on — it hits /api/now/stats/{table} and returns the rolled-up count without fetching rows — or snow_record_manage({ action: "query" }), which reads the X-Total-Count response header and reports it as total_count.

That second option is not free. The count comes from a second GET against the same table, carrying your query and sysparm_count but no sysparm_limit and no sysparm_fields. The Table API's documented default limit is 10000, so that request asks for every column of up to ten thousand rows, under the client's 60-second timeout. (sysparm_count is not a documented Table API parameter — the documented one is sysparm_no_count — so do not assume it turns the request into a cheap header-only response.) If a snow_record_manage query times out on cmdb_ci or sys_audit while the same filter works fine in snow_query_table, that second request is why. Narrow the query, or count with snow_aggregate_metrics, passing it the same query — called bare it counts the whole table.

display_value changes what the values mean, not just how they look

sysparm_display_value has three settings and this MCP uses all three.

false (snow_query_table and snow_get_by_sysid default). Stored values. Choice fields are their stored numbers (state: "2"), date/time fields are UTC in YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss, and reference fields are objects:

"assigned_to": {
  "link": "https://dev12345.service-now.com/api/now/table/sys_user/681ccaf9c0a8016400b98a06818d57c7",
  "value": "681ccaf9c0a8016400b98a06818d57c7"
}

So record.assigned_to is not a username and not a sys_id — it is an object, and string-concatenating it gives you [object Object]. Reach for record.assigned_to.value. Note also that snow_query_table does not send sysparm_exclude_reference_link, so every reference column carries that full URL. On a hundred-row query with ten reference columns the links are most of the payload; pass fields to keep columns you do not need out of the response.

true (what display_value: true sends). Display values replace stored values. state becomes "In Progress", references become {display_value: "Beth Anglin", link: "..."}, and date/time fields are rendered in the calling user's time zone and date format rather than UTC. Values read this way cannot be fed back into an update or into an encoded query — state=In Progress matches nothing. Use it to show a human what a record says, not to compute with.

all (what snow_record_manage sends by default). Every field arrives as {display_value, value}, including sys_id, sys_created_on and plain strings. Nothing in the record is a bare string. On action: "query" — and only there — snow_record_manage also sends sysparm_exclude_reference_link=true, so a reference is {display_value, value} with no link. On action: "get" it sends only sysparm_fields and sysparm_display_value, and the documented default for sysparm_exclude_reference_link is false, so the same reference field comes back as {display_value, link, value} — the link is there.

snow_record_manage silently narrows your field list

snow_record_manage actions get and query take fields as a comma-separated string, not an array. When you omit it, the tool does not fall back to "all fields" — it substitutes a hardcoded default list for the table, and says nothing about it.

• For a preset name (incident, change, user, ci, asset, hr_case, …) you get that preset's field list. The incident preset returns number, short_description, description, state, priority, urgency, impact, assigned_to, assignment_group, caller_id, category, subcategory, opened_at, resolved_at, closed_at — and no sys_id.
• For any other table you get exactly sys_id, sys_created_on, sys_updated_on. A query against sys_script without fields returns three timestamps per row and no name, no script, no table.

Two consequences worth internalising:

1. The sys_id you get back can be an empty string. result.sys_id is extracted from the returned record; if sys_id was not in the field list, there is nothing to extract and the field comes back as "". Downstream, that becomes a lookup for a record that does not exist.

2. Do not trust the url field on action: "get". It concatenates the raw record value, which under display_value: "all" is an object — the link ends in sys_id=[object Object], or sys_id=undefined when sys_id was never requested. Build the link from result.sys_id yourself.

   action: "query" has no top-level sys_id at all, and each row is assembled as {sys_id: <extracted value>, ...record} — the spread puts the raw column back on top, so under the default display_value the per-row sys_id is a {display_value, value} object, not a string. The per-row _url is built from the extracted value and is fine (it merely ends in an empty sys_id= when you did not ask for the column), but a link you assemble yourself out of row.sys_id will not be. Take row.sys_id.value.

Always pass fields explicitly on snow_record_manage, and always include sys_id in it:

await snow_record_manage({
  action: "query",
  table: "incident",
  query: "active=true^priority=1",
  fields: "sys_id,number,short_description,state,assigned_to",
  limit: 50,
})

snow_query_table has the opposite behaviour: omitting fields returns every column, and when you do pass fields it prepends sys_id for you. That is the one place it is friendlier than snow_record_manage.

Journal fields come back empty, and half a fix does not work

comments and work_notes are journal fields. The text is not stored on the record — it lives in sys_journal_field, one row per entry. The Table API does not return journal content by default, so a plain read gives you an empty string and no error:

// Returns work_notes: ""  — and the record has forty work notes
await snow_query_table({ table: "incident", query: "number=INC0010023", fields: ["number", "work_notes"] })

sysparm_display_value=true makes the Table API return the whole accumulated journal as one string. But work_notes, comments, additional_comments and close_notes are all in this MCP's truncation list, so with truncate_output at its default you get the first 200 characters of that string — one entry's timestamp-and-author header and about two lines of text. Both halves or nothing:

await snow_query_table({
  table: "incident",
  query: "number=INC0010023",
  fields: ["number", "work_notes", "comments"],
  display_value: true,
  truncate_output: false,
})

The alternative, and the better one when you want entries rather than a blob, is snow_get_journal_entries, which queries sys_journal_field directly on name=<table>^element_id=<record sys_id>. Each row carries element (comments or work_notes — both come back mixed, filter yourself), value (the entry text), sys_created_on and sys_created_by.

Three things about that tool that will cost you time otherwise:

• It does not order the results. No ORDERBY is sent and there is no order parameter, so do not assume the newest entry is first or last. Sort on sys_created_on after you get them.

• It filters on name=<table>, and old rows may not carry your table. Journal entries used to be written against the base task table rather than the child table they came from; ServiceNow changed this in the Jakarta release, but rows written before then — including anything carried across a clone or migration — still say task. If a record visibly has work notes and the tool returns zero entries, re-run the read yourself against element_id alone, which is a sys_id and therefore unique:

  await snow_query_table({
    table: "sys_journal_field",
    query: "element_id=sys_id_here^ORDERBYDESCsys_created_on",
    fields: ["element", "value", "sys_created_by", "sys_created_on"],
    truncate_output: false,
  })
  

• It sends sysparm_display_value=true, so sys_created_on on each entry comes back in the calling user's time zone and date format, not UTC. Don't compare those strings against a UTC timestamp you got from a snow_query_table read.

snow_get_journal_entries itself applies no truncation, so entry text arrives whole. The fallback query above does not get that for free: value is a plain string column, so snow_query_table's 400-character rule cuts long entries unless you pass truncate_output: false.

Writing is a separate path: snow_add_comment PATCHes comments (or work_notes when work_note: true) on the record, which appends an entry — journal fields never overwrite. It returns {added: true} built locally after a successful PATCH; it does not read the entry back, so if you need to confirm what landed, read it with snow_get_journal_entries afterwards.

Reading a full artifact body

For a widget, script include, UX page or flow, snow_pull_artifact GETs the record with no sysparm_* parameters at all — no truncation, no display values — and hands back the body fields as a {filename: content} map. Which columns become which files depends on the table, and only these four are covered:

Table	Files it emits
sp_widget	<name>.html (template), <name>.server.js (script), <name>.client.js (client_script), <name>.css (css), <name>.options.json (option_schema)
sys_script_include	<name>.js (script)
sys_ux_page	<name>.html (html — not template), <name>.client.js (client_script)
sys_hub_flow	<name>.flow.json — a JSON.stringify of the whole record, not one column

Two more things before you reach for it:

• The map always carries an extra generated README.md — a summary the tool writes itself, not artifact content. If you iterate the files map, skip that key.
• It is classified permission: "write", and on the stdio transport it also writes every file to disk, under output_dir (default <tmpdir>/serac-artifacts/<table>/<name>). On HTTP output_dir is rejected and you only get the inline map. Nothing is written to ServiceNow either way, but your filesystem is not left alone — if you only want to look at a body, snow_get_by_sysid leaves no trace.

For anything else — a business rule, a UI action, an ACL script, a transform script — use snow_get_by_sysid. By default it sends no display-value parameter, and it applies no truncation of any kind, which makes it the rawest read available here and the right default once you already have a sys_id.

await snow_get_by_sysid({
  table: "sys_security_acl",
  sys_id: "sys_id_here",
  fields: ["name", "operation", "type", "admin_overrides", "condition", "script"],
})

Note its one asymmetry: a 404 comes back as success: true with found: false, not as an error. Check found before you read record.

What a failed read looks like

When an HTTP error carries an error body — the {"error": {"message": ..., "detail": ...}, "status": "failure"} shape — the shared HTTP client re-throws it with a ServiceNow: prefix, so what reaches you is the platform's own wording rather than Request failed with status code 403. Two cases are handled before that: a 502 or 503 is converted into an explicit "instance is hibernating" message naming the URL to open, and a 401 triggers one silent token refresh and retry before it is allowed to fail.

The prefix is not a reliable tell, though. ServiceNow also returns that error body on a 200 sometimes, and the client throws on those too — with the platform's own message and no prefix. So an unprefixed failure means one of two things: no error body on an HTTP error, or an error body that arrived on a success status. Read the message, not the prefix.

The reads that hurt are the ones that don't fail:

• ACLs filter rows silently. The Table API enforces the same ACLs as the UI, evaluated as the OAuth service account, which is usually not your admin UI user. Rows you cannot read are absent from records; nothing tells you they were removed, and count and X-Total-Count reflect only what you were allowed to see. A query returning fewer rows than the list view shows is a permissions result, not an empty table.
• Field-level ACLs remove columns the same way — the key is simply missing from the record object.
• A misspelled column in fields is ignored. The Table API reference says of sysparm_fields: "Invalid fields are ignored." You get a record without that key and no error. assigned_too and assignment_grp fail this way and look like empty data.

Know the columns before you query

sys_dictionary holds a row only for the table that declares a column — inherited columns are not repeated on the child. So a sys_dictionary read filtered on name=incident returns the incident-specific columns and omits what task declares, short_description and state among them. The field is real, your query works, and the schema output does not list it. The same gap applies to sc_req_item and sc_task (parent task), alm_hardware (parent alm_asset) and every cmdb_ci_* class.

snow_discover_table_fields and snow_table_schema_discovery both query sys_dictionary by table name alone, so both have that gap. When you need one field's real definition, use snow_describe_field: it walks sys_db_object.super_class to the root class, applies the sys_dictionary_override rows it finds anywhere on that chain, and resolves the field's sys_choice list — so it answers incident / short_description instead of returning nothing.

If you do use snow_discover_table_fields for a table-wide listing, read name and label off it and nothing else. It queries sys_dictionary without sysparm_display_value, so internal_type and reference arrive as {link, value} objects: fields[].type and fields[].reference are objects, not strings. And because the tool builds relationships by filtering type === "reference" — a comparison that can never match an object — relationships is always [], even though include_relationships defaults to true. An empty relationships from that tool is not evidence the table has no reference fields.

Checklist before you act on a read

1. Am I reading content — a script, a description, a journal entry — or just identifiers? Content needs truncate_output: false or snow_get_by_sysid.
2. Did I scan the values for ... [truncated,? The truncated flag will not tell me.
3. Is the number I am about to report a count, or is it snow_query_table's total?
4. If I am about to write a value back, was it read with display_value off? A display value is not a storable value.
5. Did I pass fields to snow_record_manage, with sys_id in it?
6. Is a reference field I am treating as a string actually {link, value}?