Form designer is duplicating sections

Eileen Hessmill · ‎10-02-2017

(Recently upgraded to Jakarta.)

I added a UI Policy for the incident.short_description to make it mandatory in dev. Works fine. Once I imported the change to Test, the Incident form of one of our domains showed multiple sections (see below). Using the Form designer I deleted the unwanted sections and saved, but it just added another set of sections.

I went back to Dev where it still looked good to add a new section with the intention to write over all the extra sections in test, but now the form designer is adding sections to the dev instance. I've tried just deleting the sections, but they aren't removed after the save. Am I doing something wrong with the Form designer? All the other domains look ok.

This is what it should look like:

Snehal2 · ‎08-31-2018

Even I faced this Issue when I tried reordering the field from one section to other on Incident form. When ever I tried deleting the duplicate sections that were created, It was again getting created automatically again and again. 😞 And when I saw in the table where sections are created, there the duplicate sections that were created were not visible.

Solution To fix this:

Go in update set where this modifications are captured.
Then open the update set record, select the Show related record link.
And from there delete the duplicate sections created by you.

Note: Never use Form Design for reordering the fields or any thing . Instead use Configure ->Form Layout.

Hope this will help the needy...

Mark it correct if worked for u as well so that it will be helpful to others as well

Regards,

Snehal M

View solution in original post

Chuck Tomasi · ‎10-02-2017

Hi Eileen,

I have seen this happen in an earlier release. It seems most common when you start moving sections around (particularly the top section to another location.)

The tables involved with forms, views, sections, and fields, is a bit complex to walk through in the community. One wrong move and your form could be rendered useless. I strongly recommend reaching out to customer support on this one. Sorry.

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Contact Support | ServiceNow

Manny11 · ‎05-08-2025

Hello,

We are currently experiencing a similar issue, when customer update are imported into the instance via update form sections get duplicated. We are using Domian Separation, and I believe this is part of the issue.

When we load update sets via Global Domain, some customer updates are in a different domain "Domain X". Can this cause Form sections to be duplicated?

CarlosAndrC · ‎07-24-2025

Hello @Manny11 ! this is the exactly behaviour that I saw working with an instance with domain separations and this happened when commits the update set but I still couldn´t find the solution yet. I saw an article with some solution, but for me it wasn´t the expected. (https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0716271)

Manny11 · ‎07-28-2025

HI Ticket Team response to include UX Team from ServiceNow,

It looks like we're dealing with PRB1463011/KB0951888. The workaround for this, according to the UX team is to create your forms, views, and sections individually on each instance and not try to move them through update sets. If that's not an option, then the recommendation is manual cleanup of the duplicated global components.

There is a workaround script but I we couldn't get it working properly. I wish I had a better response for you. Please let me know if there's anything else related to this case that I can help with.