Getting the Reference Table for a ServiceNow list field (glide_list)

If you want to get the reference table for a ServiceNow list field, perhaps to reformat the data, the below functions usually work:

glideRecord.getElement(fieldName).getED().reference;

However sometimes getElement doesn’t work as was the case recently for me in a client callable scoped script include. In this situation, I had to rig up my own function, which looked like this

getFieldProperties: function(tableName, fieldName) {

            var dictGR = new GlideRecord("sys_dictionary");
            dictGR.addQuery('name', tableName);
            dictGR.addQuery('element', fieldName);
            dictGR.setLimit(1);
            dictGR.query();
            if (dictGR.next()) {
                var results = {};
                results.fieldName = fieldName;
		results.referenceTable = dictGR.getValue('reference');
                results.type = dictGR.internal_type.name.getDisplayValue();
			
                return results;
            } else {
                var results = {};
                results.fieldName = fieldName;
                results.referenceTable = '';
                results.type = '';
                return results;
            }

    }