Activity Actions in Process Automation Designer

[Visakha Dhanuk1]

Hi,

I have a requirement wherein I have to remove the OOB buttons like Skip, Update, Mark Complete for the Playbooks and add my custom buttons. While I checked the OOB functionalities are read only and I am not able to disable those.

Tried to override the ACL as well but no luck. Does anyone have any solution on how to achieve this?

Thanks

[DJ Wolfson]

Any update on this?

[Riya Verma]

Hi @Visakha Dhanuk1 ,

Hope you are doing great.

To remove the out-of-the-box (OOB) buttons like Skip, Update, and Mark Complete for Playbooks in ServiceNow and add custom buttons, follow these steps:

1. Go to "System UI" > "UI Actions" in your ServiceNow instance. Create a new UI Action with the desired name and behavior. Define the conditions under which this action should appear on the Playbook form.
2. Go to "Studio" > "Playbooks" and select the specific playbook. In the "Form Sections" tab, find the "Header" section. Edit the "Header" section and remove the OOB buttons like Skip, Update, and Mark Complete.
3. Edit the "Header" section of the playbook form again. Use the UI Action you created earlier to add your custom button.
4. In your custom UI Action, specify conditions that determine when it should be visible or hidden on the playbook form.

5. Override ACLs (if necessary): If you still encounter issues with OOB functionalities, review and modify the Access Control Lists (ACLs) associated with the OOB buttons. Ensure your custom UI Action has the necessary ACLs to perform the desired actions.

[DJ Wolfson]

Thank you! Sadly the approach and client I'm working with are in a scoped app and thus deleting those would cause a lot of issues for other implementors. However this did help and I found the workaround that worked for the User Form Activities (and likely some others):

1. Create a new Action Assignment, and use an action name you're trying to replace/remove.
   1. Ie. If you're on the User Form activity, you can use: skip_activity (Skip), update_record (Update), and save_and_complete_activity (Mark Complete)
2. Replace all other fields with whatever logic you wish.
   1. If you would like to completely remove the button, I passed the Condition `false` in the 'Scripted condition' field which auto-removed it from all activities.

It's a little more hackie than I was hoping but it got the job done for my 'User Form' activities, however it doesn't seem to work for my 'Show List of Record' activities.

[LaurentChicoine]

The cleanest/easiest way I found was to use the "Action Exclusions" related list so that I can exclude my scoped table from the actions we do not want to use.

Here is how I went about it:

1. Open the list of Activity Definitions (sys_pd_activity_definition.list)
2. Find and open the definition for which I want to disable an action
3. In the related list Playbook Actions, find and open the playbook action I want to disable (clicking on the Action Assignment referenced value)
4. In the Action Exclusions relation list of the Action Assignment, do a right click on the filter and open in new window
5. In the opened list click new and add your table exclusion for the table on which you don't want the action to display