Is it recommended that Cloning of existing widgets in Service Portal?

[Bhagya Lakshmi]

Hello Team,

I want to know that cloning of existing widgets is recommended in the portal. If I clone the widget, is it considered as a custom widget? Any problems we will face when instance updation?

Can you share your suggestions?

Thanks.

[Sondre Pedersen]

If you want to take advantages of an already made widget and customize them to your preference i would clone. Since then the OOB widgets will still get updates then.

"Note: Base system widgets are read only so you can benefit from future updates. To make changes, you can clone base system widgets. However, cloned widgets are considered custom and do not benefit from future updates to the widgets they were cloned from." - Reference to Docs

[Luke Van Epen]

Yes, it's the only way to make any changes to the OOB functionality. 

I would use the Widget description to document the lines of code that you changed and why, so that if the OOB widgets get updated with that feature in a future version, you'll know exactly what you need to do in order to take advantage of the stability of OOB along with the features of customization

[Bhagya Lakshmi]

Thanks, Luke.

I have one doubt here. For example,  I cloned the service catalogue widget in Kingstone version. After upgrade to London version OOB service catalogue widget code changed. Will my cloned widget works as before or will we face any issues?

[Luke Van Epen]

Your cloned widget will not be affected by upgrades, you can continue to use it after upgrading without issues. You may run into issues if your widget is designed to work with and communicate to other widgets on the same page, because newer versions of those other widgets may work slightly differently.