Email links using ${URI} and ${URI_REF}

https://www.servicenowguru.com/system-definition/email-notifications-system-definition/email-links-uri-uriref/

Email links using ${URI} and ${URI_REF}

Ilearned something new today while building out a few email notifications. If you’ve been around Service-now for a while
you’re probably familiar with the formatting of email notification messages. One of the common requirements for outgoing email notifications is to include a link to the originating record or task in the email. Doing this makes it easy for end users to return to the record that they need to work on. There are a couple of simple ways to include these links in the body of an email notification in Service-now. One way I’ve known about for a long time, the other way I just discovered.

The first way to add a link to a record in an outgoing email is to use the ${URI} shortcut anywhere in the body of your email notification. Using this method produces a link in your email that looks like this…

While the ${URI} method works great for most cases, you can’t do anything to modify the outgoing link. All of the links generated with this method will be formatted exactly as shown with the word ‘LINK’ in capital letters. The second method gives you an alternative to this static ‘LINK’ link.
You can invoke this shortcut by using ${URI_REF} anywhere in the body of your email notification. Using ${URI_REF} takes the display value for the linked record and uses that for the link text instead of the word ‘LINK’.

The ${URI_REF} token was introduced in the Winter 2010 Stable 1 release.

It is also possible to drill through to a related record and find the link for that record. For example, if I were sending out an email notification from an approval record and I wanted to add a link for the corresponding task to be approved, I could add it like this…
${sysapproval.URI_REF}

If neither of these ways suits your needs, it is always possible to create your own link to whatever record you need to link to. Since the email link is just HTML you just need to provide the correct URL and wrap it in the correct HTML tag. Here’s a sample function I got from the forums that takes a table name and record sys_id value as inputs and returns a formatted link based on the information provided.

var tbl = current.getTableName();
var sysID = current.sys_id;
var link = createLinkForObject(tbl,sysID);
template.print(link);
function createLinkForObject(strTableName, strSysID){
   return 'LINK TEXT HERE';
}