question How to display an image in the form field when the field stores an image URL in ITSM forum

How to display an image in the form field when the field stores an image URL

VamsiK144833510 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 09:21:31 GMT

I am working on a custom scoped application in ServiceNow and trying to display a country flag image on a form.

The image URL is retrieved from an external REST API (ipgeolocation.io) and is successfully stored in a String field (country_flag).

However, instead of rendering the image, the form displays only the image URL as plain text.

I also tried using the Image field type, but in that case the field shows “Click to add photo” and does not render the external image URL.

My goal is to display the actual image on the form using the stored URL, not the URL text itself.

Re: How to display an image in the form field when the field stores an image URL

KrishnaMohan — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:48:12 GMT

Hi @VamsiK144833510

I believe we don't have such OOTB attribute or functionality available for URL field type to render or display images from url. However we have some workarounds.

Solution 1: The HTML field type is designed to render tags. However, it usually shows a toolbar (bold, italic, etc.). We can make this to be "Read Only" so it just looks like an image.

Change your country_flag field type from String to HTML.
Create an onChange Client Script (or a Business Rule) that formats the URL into an image tag.
The Logic: When the REST API returns the URL, don't just save https://..., save:

ServiceNow will render this HTML directly on the form.

Solution 2:

If you want the image to look like a native part of the interface without a field box around it, you can use a UI Macro (Global) or UI Page (Scoped).

Create a UI Macro (e.g., show_country_flag_image):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <j:jelly trim="false" xmlns:j="jelly:core" xmlns:g="glide" xmlns:j2="null" xmlns:g2="null"> <g2:evaluate var="jvar_my_var" expression="var val = current.getValue('country_flag'); val;" /> <img src="$[jvar_my_var]" style="height: 40px; width: auto; border: 1px solid #ddd; padding: 2px;" /> </j:jelly>

2 . Create a UI Formatter (e.g: Render image)

3. Add a Formatter to the form

Output : you can see the image on form from url as shown below

If this helped to answer your query, please mark it helpful & accept the solution.
Thanks!
Krishnamohan

Re: How to display an image in the form field when the field stores an image URL

Ankur Bawiskar — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 02:50:15 GMT

@VamsiK144833510

for image to shown it has to be stored in ServiceNow

You can't directly render external image directly on platform

You can try HTML type field to hold that image and then make that field readonly

💡 If my response helped, please mark it as correct ✅ and close the thread 🔒— this helps future readers find the solution faster! 🙏

Re: How to display an image in the form field when the field stores an image URL

VamsiK144833510 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 04:47:52 GMT

Thank you for taking time to provide the above steps,

Instead of url,is there any other way to directly load the image on the form?