Move your mouse round the image for details:

A Meta-Update script is an ini file with Control and Assignment sections.

This image is represents a Control Section — telling Meta-Update what to do.

Control sections automatically iterate assigning data to a Tag.

In each iteration, Output to an ARS or ServiceNow record or file may be done.

Other sections can be launched to query and/or output more records.

Control Sections specify Assignment Sections fired at various times.

Assignment Sections can be used

Init	when the section starts
Pre	after the Tag is loaded
Post	after the output is done
Launch	After the last launched section completes
Term	when the section ends

You set field values in Assignment Sections. You can also:

• load other data records
• set script variables
• fire server and client processes
• translate and look up values against internal lists, CSVs, Queries
• use regular expressions and arithmetic
• conditionally include other Assignment Sections

Iteration

A Control Section can run once, or iterate through:

• the rows of a Query, SQL Query, or File
• a Diary Field's entries
• a Delimited String's entries
• the fields of a Tag
• while an expression is true
• while an expression is true

On each iteration, the next record is loaded into the Tag specified.

For SQL Queries and File records, interpretation and transformation masks are applied.

A Control Section does work. It can Query, Update.

Control Sections can also Launch other control sections.

This makes Meta-Update ideal when dealing with trees of data,

Q1 and Q2 iterate through Incidents — and within each Incident — WorkLogs. The script has access to all fields including attachments.

In this way, trees of dependent data can be handled a complete tree at a time.

Output

A Control Section can:

• Update or Create an ARS or ServiceNow row
• Output a new CSV row or more text for a [ new ] file

For ARS records, Merge can be used and workflow can be inhibited.

Records updated are reloaded so that server updates are available to your script.

The form being updated and the query for the update record may be references. ARS queries may use field database names.

If no changes are detected, the update is inhibited by default.