Working with forms in Creator Studio
Summarize
Summary of Working with forms in Creator Studio
Forms in Creator Studio are essential for creating catalog items that users can request, such as hardware, services, or permissions. Each catalog item requires its own distinct form to collect the necessary information for fulfilling requests. Creator Studio streamlines form creation by providing templates and tools to customize questions, layout, and form behavior. Once ready, forms can be published to appear in an app's catalog and accessed through Service Catalog, Service Portal, or Employee Center.
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Key Features
- Form Templates: Creator Studio offers default templates with starter questions to accelerate form creation. Administrators can manage templates and control who fills out forms.
- Customizable Questions: Forms can include general questions (e.g., text input, dropdowns) or reference-based questions linked to predefined tables. Dynamic behavior allows forms to adapt questions based on user responses, ensuring relevant data collection.
- Layout Customization: Users can modify the form’s appearance using columns, images, dividers, and text to improve clarity and flow.
- Form States: Forms exist in Draft or Published states. Draft forms allow ongoing edits without affecting live catalogs. Publishing a form makes it visible as a catalog item in deployed apps.
- Version Control: Editing a published form creates a new draft version. Changes must be marked ready and the app redeployed to update live forms. Users can undo changes to revert to the last published version.
- Form Management: Forms cannot be deleted once created. Published forms can be hidden to remove them from the catalog and app without deletion.
- Storage: Submitted form data is stored in the app’s request table, consolidating all requests from multiple forms.
- Access and Categorization: Published forms appear in Service Catalog and related portals, and can be associated with taxonomy topics to improve discoverability.
Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers
ServiceNow customers can leverage Creator Studio to efficiently build and manage request forms tailored to their organizational needs. By using form templates and customization options, they can gather precise requester information for various catalog items. The ability to dynamically adjust questions based on user input enhances the user experience and data accuracy.
Publishing forms only when ready ensures that requesters see polished and accurate catalog items. The versioning and hiding capabilities provide flexibility to update or retire forms without disrupting service. Ultimately, this structured approach to form creation and management supports smooth request fulfillment and better catalog organization within ServiceNow applications.
To add items or services to your catalog, you must create a different form for each thing being requested.
- How form templates get you started creating your own forms.
- How to customize the layout and questions on your forms.
- How to make a form (AKA catalog item) appear in your app.
- How to make a form stop appearing in your app!
What is a form?
A form is a list of questions that people answer to make a request. They might ask for a keyboard, a laptop, or permission to take a vacation. The answers to those questions provide the fulfiller with all the information that they need to fulfill the request. For example, if someone asks for a laptop, the fulfiller might need to know the size, the model number, the operating system, and so forth.
In addition to questions, forms can contain images, headings, and text descriptions to explain the questions.
You’ll need a different form for every type of item or request that a requester can ask for. Why? Because the questions you must ask for a keyboard differ from the questions that you must ask to give a requester permission to take a vacation. So, there’s one form for each type of request that people can make. You can think of a form as representing a catalog item.
Your app will likely have multiple forms, meaning multiple things the requester can ask for. We call a collection of forms a catalog of items.
- Item
- Something a requester can ask for. Each item requires its own form.
- Catalog
- A collection of items that represent all the items a requester can ask for.
Some examples of catalogs and items
| Service catalog | Example app | Sample catalog items |
|---|---|---|
| HR self-service | Human Resources global people portal app |
|
| Branding resources | Marketing and branding app |
|
| IT fulfillment | Hardware request app |
|
Let Creator Studio give you a head start
When you choose a form template to start creating your app, Creator Studio builds a form with questions you might like to use. The questions and their layout make up the form.
- Form template
- A set of questions arranged on a form provided by Creator Studio.
The form template that Creator Studio provides is called the Creator Studio Default Template. It contains three questions to get you started. You can customize, add, and subtract questions on your form.
Your administrator can delete the default template, create additional form templates, and restrict who can fill out the forms. If you're an administrator, you can read more about this topic in Creating catalog templates for use in Creator Studio apps.
To store the forms that requesters fill out, Creator Studio creates a table by default. One row represents one filled-out form.
Your application can contain as many forms as you need. When you create a form, Creator Studio uses the app's request table to hold the submitted answers for each form. All requests from all of an app's forms are stored in the same table.
Types of questions you can ask
- General questions are where you give requesters an empty box to write a short answer (think name or email) or a list of choices to pick from (like a dropdown menu or those little circles you fill in).
- Reference-based questions are where you provide a list of choices that you define in a table.
You can add questions to forms that have been preconfigured by your admin, and can't be edited. Adding a Question set element to a form enables you to select from the curated options.
Forms can automatically update how questions appear (or are hidden) based on how users answer a them. We call this dynamic behavior. For example, if a user says they want a T-shirt for an event they're attending, you can make a T-shirt size field required.
Laying out the questions
Creator Studio provides an initial layout for its default form. You can use columns, images, divider lines, and more to customize the layout of the questions on the forms. There are two procedures that you can use to customize a form:
- Changing the questions – Change the number of questions, what they’re asking, and adjust where questions appear on a form. Find information on changing questions in Customize your form for an app in Creator Studio.
Figure 1. Editing a question on a form - Changing the look and feel of the form – Add pictures, write some text to explain the questions, and even move them around to make them flow smoothly. You can read about that in Change the layout of an app's record in Creator Studio.
Figure 2. Edit the look and feel of the app's tile
Where can I see forms?
After deployment, your app lives as forms in the Service Catalog and categories you specified when creating the forms.
Users can access those forms directly in Service Catalog, as well as Service Portal and Employee Center.
If you associate the app's form with one or more topics, the form will appear in the relevant, dynamically created topic pages in Employee Center. Find out more about topics in Associate a catalog item with a taxonomy topic in Employee Center, and more about taxonomy, which is a categorization method, in Unified Taxonomy for Employee Center.
Making forms available for an app
- Draft
- Published
A published form appears as an item in your catalog of offerings. For example, your site might enable requesters to ask for computers, mice, monitors, keyboards, technical support, and so forth. Each item requires a different form, and appears as a different catalog item in your app.
- Publishing a form means that the form will appear as a catalog item only after your app is deployed. That’s why the button label is Mark as ready.
- Deploying an app is what system admins do to make your app available for people to use.
Changing published forms
It’s inevitable. You deploy your app and find that you need to revise the questions on your form. No problem! Just edit the form as you did when you created it.
Editing a form creates a new Draft version of the form that you can update and then Mark as ready when you’re finished. Any changes you save to the Draft version won’t affect the catalog item in your deployed app. To update the forms in the deployed app, you must redeploy the app.
Undoing form changes
You can select the Undo all changes option, available in the form header's more options icon (
), to reset a form to the most recently published version.
Deleting published forms
- If it’s in the Draft state, just don’t Mark it ready.
- If the form is in a Published state, you can hide it so it no longer appears in the catalog. See Hide a form from use in the ServiceNow AI Platform in Creator Studio for more information on hiding forms.