If you’ve spent any time building in ServiceNow Workspaces, you know the "ownership" dilemma. You want to change how a button behaves or pop up a specific modal, but to do it, you often have to take ownership of the entire page in UI Builder. This makes upgrades harder and maintenance a headache. In the Australia release, we’re fixing that with UI Interactions.
What exactly is a UI Interaction?
Think of a UI Interaction as an encapsulated "recipe" of UI logic. It’s a combination of scripts, UI components (like modals or alerts), and navigation steps that can be triggered from anywhere (a Declarative Action button, a page event, or even a component event).
Key Highlights from the Australia Release:
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Integrated Editor: You’ll find a new UI Interactions tab right inside UI Builder. It feels familiar because it uses the same ecosystem you're already used to.
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Step-by-Step Logic: You build your interaction linearly. Want an alert? Add a step. Need a modal? Add a step. Want to run a server script after the user clicks "Save"? Just add the step.
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The Playground: Real-time preview! As you configure your modal size or button labels, you see the "Playground" update instantly so you know exactly what the end-user will see.
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True Interoperability: Because these interactions are separated from the page itself, they are truly reusable. You can define a "Create Record" interaction once and trigger it from five different workspaces.
The "New Meow" Case Study
During the stream, Stephanie demonstrated a classic requirement: replacing the standard "New" button on a list with a modal dialog. In the past, this required complex add-on event mapping. With UI Interactions, she created a "Generic" interaction, added a form modal step, and linked it to a Declarative Action using simple double-bracket {{ }} data binding. No page ownership required.
Getting Started
The best part? We are shipping demo data out of the box. You don’t have to start from a blank slate. You can open up the examples, see how we handled complex logic or script steps, and duplicate them for your own use cases.
The Australia release is all about making the "new way" of doing things the "easy way." Check out the full stream above to see the framework in action!
