Journal fields rearrange themselves with the Activity formatter

[Bradley Ross]

When you have multiple journal fields on a form, such as you get with the out of the box incident form on a free developer instance, the Activity formatter will rearrange the journal fields for you in contradiction of the explicit configuration of the form. For example, on the new incident form (when the Activity formatter is not present), the public Additional Comments field appears first, followed by the Work Notes field.

Once you save the incident, the Activity formatter kicks in. The form will load with the fields in the desired order, but then will redraw and the fields will be in the reverse order. This has led to confusion among my analysts.

Here is a video that demonstrates the problem on my personal developer instance. SN field order bug - YouTube

I've got an open enhancement request with ServiceNow, FTASK25224. If you want to submit one too if this issue affects you, perhaps that will increase the likelihood that this will be addresed in an upcoming patch.   I'm seeing this behavior on Geneva Patch 4.

[Bradley Ross · Accepted solution]

After talking to five different developers at the Knowledge 16 conference, we finally found one that knew what was happening here. For performance reasons, the field order is determined by a property rather than by doing a lookup at the form configuration table. Thus, you need to change the settings for the Activity Formatter to affect the field order.

1. As an admin, go to the form with the issue of fields rearranging themselves.
2. Click the filter button at the top right of the activity formatter.
3. At the bottom of the list of fields, there is an option to "Configure Available Fields"
4. The sequence of the journal fields in that slush bucket is what controls the order the fields display when the form redraws itself. Make sure it matches the order you're displaying fields on the form layout so that they are the same when you create a new record and when you have an existing record.

[Amit Jain2]

This is the right solution.

[Pearl3]

This is really helpful. I kept thinking what was wrong and I was so sure I did all the configurations of the form right. Thanks for this answer.