How to Add a New Field to a Form in ServiceNow
With Laurence Tindall
In this article, you'll learn how to add a new field to a form in ServiceNow. Before we go into the system, let's explain why adding new fields to ServiceNow is extremely beneficial to you and your organization. Adding new fields to forms in ServiceNow is a great way to capture additional metadata to the records that you create and manage in the system. Out of the box, each module in ServiceNow has most of the fields that you would typically need, but in some instances, there are times when you would want to create a new field for capturing a specific value or data point.
In today's tutorial, we're going to create and add a new field on the incident form for capturing vendor-issued incident numbers. This field will be used in cases where we have to open an external ticket with one of our vendors and we want to reference that ticket number when following up with the vendor. Now that we've covered why creating new fields is important, let's go into ServiceNow and create one.
Please note you'll need the ServiceNow Admin role assigned to your user account in order to create a new field. Please follow your organization's software development process when making changes to ServiceNow. Typically, most organizations have a development, test, and production instance of ServiceNow, so before pushing any changes to your production instance make sure you add this change to an update set and move it through the appropriate instances before publishing it to your production instance.
Add a New Field to a Form
The first thing we want to do is open up ServiceNow, go into the application navigator, and type in incidents. Now click on the open module located underneath the incident application and open up the record you would like to add a field to. To add a new field, right-click on the form header and click on the form design option located under the configure sub-menu. A new tab will open displaying the form editor for the incident form. To the left of the form editor, you have the fields tab; in this tab, you can drag and drop fields that already exist on the incident table, but have not been placed on the incident form.
In the field types tab, you can pick the type of field that you wish to create, and then drag and drop it into the form. We have reference fields, date and time fields, currency fields, etc. In this example, we're going to select the string field, as this type of field is used to store text values like a reference number. All you need to do is drag the string field into the incident section of the form editor, placing the field here means that the field will appear in the main section of the form.
Creating the Details of the Field
Now that we have the field placed in the main section of the form, let's give the field a name. To do this, click on the gear icon, and a properties window will now appear. In the label field, the value in this field will be used as the display name for the field on the form. For this example, we are going to enter the vendor reference number. The name field is used to define the name in the database for this field. Next, we have default; this field allows you to define a default value for this field. For this example, we are going to leave it blank since we'll want to store a unique vendor reference value in this field for each applicable incident record.
The max. length field allows you to define the maximum character length that can be stored in this field. For this example, since most vendor incident reference numbers are quite short, we are just going to enter 40, as this is the minimum maximum character length you can define. The next two fields, mandatory and read only, allow you to specify if the field should be mandatory when creating an incident record, and if the field should be read-only. For this example, we will leave them unchecked as we don't want these constraints on the field.
The final field, dependent, allows you to specify another field that this new field is dependent on. This means that this field can only be edited when a value is selected in the dependent field. We are going to leave it blank since it is not dependent on any other field. The next step is to click on the X button at the top of the window, and click on the save button. Now that we've saved our changes, let's close this form editor tab and refresh our incident form to see the new field. As you can see (reference video at 5:15) new field has been created and added to this form and is now ready to be used.
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