Working with forms in Creator Studio

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated June 16, 2026
  • 6 minutes to read
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    Summary of Working with forms in Creator Studio

    In Creator Studio, forms serve as customized request templates where users answer specific questions to request items or services. Each distinct item or service requires its own form, which collectively form a catalog within your app. These forms are essential for capturing the necessary information that fulfillers need to process requests efficiently. Forms can include various elements such as questions, images, headings, and text descriptions to clarify the request requirements.

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    Key Features

    • Form Templates: Creator Studio provides default form templates with starter questions to simplify form creation. You can customize, add, or remove questions to suit your needs.
    • Question Types: You can ask general questions (short answers or choice lists) or reference-based questions that pull from predefined tables, enabling dynamic, data-driven forms.
    • Dynamic Behavior: Forms can adapt based on user responses by showing or hiding questions and auto-populating fields, enhancing user experience and data accuracy.
    • Layout Customization: Adjust the visual arrangement of questions using columns, images, and dividers to improve form clarity and flow.
    • Form Lifecycle Management: Forms have Draft and Published states. You can iteratively develop forms in Draft and publish them to make them available as catalog items in your deployed app.
    • Form Storage: Submitted form responses are stored in a single request table specific to your app, enabling centralized data management.
    • Multiple Forms per App: You can create numerous forms within a single app to cover all catalog items, such as hardware requests, HR services, or branding resources.
    • Visibility and Access: Published forms appear in the Service Catalog, Service Portal, or Employee Center, and can be associated with taxonomy topics for dynamic categorization.
    • Administrative Controls: Administrators can manage form templates, restrict form access, and delete templates as needed.

    Practical Use and Management

    • Creating and Customizing Forms: Use Creator Studio to add forms to your app, customize questions and layout, and tailor forms to different request types.
    • Publishing and Hiding Forms: Publish forms to make them accessible to users; hide forms to deactivate them without deletion.
    • Testing: After publishing, test forms by submitting responses to verify that automations and dynamic behaviors function correctly.
    • Form Updates: Post-publication, you can edit, update, or delete forms as business needs evolve.

    Key Outcomes

    By effectively leveraging forms in Creator Studio, you enable streamlined service requests tailored to diverse business needs. This ensures requesters provide all necessary information upfront, reducing back-and-forth communication and accelerating fulfillment. The dynamic and customizable nature of forms enhances user experience and data quality, while centralized management supports efficient administrative control. Ultimately, your ServiceNow app will offer a well-organized catalog of items that users can easily access and request through intuitive, responsive forms.

    To add items or services to your catalog, you must create a different form for each thing being requested.

    Summary:
    After reading this topic, you’ll understand:
    • 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.

    Key terms:
    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

    The following table shows three catalogs. The final column shows the names of the items in each catalog. If you have three items, you’ll need three forms.

    Table 1. Example catalogs and their items
    Service catalog Example app Sample catalog items
    HR self-service Human Resources global people portal app
    • Benefits coverage question
    • Time off request
    • Change of address needed
    Branding resources Marketing and branding app
    • PowerPoint templates
    • Approved Zoom backgrounds
    • Logo files
    IT fulfillment Hardware request app
    • Mouse device
    • Headset
    • Replacement charging cable

    Let Creator Studio give you a head start

    When you choose a template to start creating your form, Creator Studio builds a form with questions you might like to use. The questions and their layout make up the form.

    Key term:
    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.
    Note:
    You can create a form using Now Assist. To learn more, see Generating forms with Now Assist.

    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.

    Note:
    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

    You get to pick the questions to ask requesters. Creator Studio provides two 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.

    You can make forms change based on how users answer questions in several ways:
    • 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.
    • Forms can automatically populate answers based on answers to record choice questions. For example, a form can enable someone to select a user for the Choose the gift box recipient field, which retrieves its values from the User table. An additional Preferred name field can be automatically populated from the First name field of the User table selection, but then edited if someone prefers a nickname.

    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
      Select a question to edit its details
    • 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
      Change the appearance of the form by changing text and images

    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 a Service Catalog, as well as Service Portal and an 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.

    Note:
    If you want to check out what a form looks like and test submitting responses to it, you can try it out after it's been published. When you try a form, you submit answers, which trigger any associated automations. For more information, see Test one of your forms for an app.

    Making forms available for an app

    Forms have two states:
    • Draft
    • Published
    Keeping forms in a Draft state lets you work on them until you’re finished. When you’re pleased with the form, publish it by selecting the Mark as ready button. Only then will it appear in your application (assuming your app has been deployed).

    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.

    Key terms:
    Don’t confuse deploying your app with publishing a form.
    • 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.