Serializing records to XML

As we saw in Chapter 1, ServiceNow Foundations, virtually everything in ServiceNow is a record. The database stores all configurations, such as business rules, UI policies, and contextual security rules in addition to all the data, such as users, groups, and tasks. And while Chapter 7, Exchanging Data – Import SetsImport Sets, Web Services, and  Other Integrations, showed how data can be exported to CSV and Excel, those formats don't typically contain all the information of every field.

In order to get an exact representation of a database record, the platform can store data in an augmented XML schema called the unload format. This stores the entire contents of a record in a serialized manner, but with a few added instructions. Each field in the record is represented as an element, and the action attribute specifies what should happen when the data is read. As a truncated example, a business rule may be serialized as follows:

<unload unload_date...