Sometimes you have a reference to a base table, but you REALLY need ServiceNow to pick up on the attributes of an extended table instead.

Let’s say for example you had a field which was a reference to the Task table, but in practice the records that are stored there are usually a particular task extension which has an override.

You can use the syntax “[reference].ref_[tableName].[fieldFromExtendedTable]” wherever you want to retrieve that field.

An example we had recently was a Task reference where we wanted to get the field Label Override of a particular record type on an Extended Table — (we’d changed “Short Description” to “Event Short Description”). On the list view in workspace, we were able to hand-edit the column list to include the derived “Short Description” field and force ServiceNow to give us the Label Override instead of the Task-level label:

“parent.ref_taskextension.short_description” .