Playbooks are one of the most powerful features for building custom processes on the ServiceNow AI Platform. A big part of that power comes from the capability to create your own Activity UIs.
With the Next Experience Framework, you can design custom UIs for each step in a playbook, tailored to your needs. You’re not limited to the out-of-the-box (OOTB) UIs. And once you’ve built a UI, you can reuse it in every playbook.
Today I ran into a problem while starting a new project. My plan was to create a new Activity UI Layout by cloning the OOTB Record layout. The recommended approach is simple:
- Find the OOTB layout that’s closest to your target design.
- Use the Clone UI Action.
- Adjust the copy until it fits your needs.
This saves a lot of time, especially because setting up Experience Properties from scratch is tedious.
But starting with the Zurich release, this no longer works. The protection policy for OOTB Activity UI Layouts has changed to Read-only. That means cloned layouts also end up read-only, and therefore unusable. This is true for fresh instances as well as for upgrades instances.
I totally understand why these records are read-only. The restriction makes sense for OOTB records, but the cloning logic should not pass that restriction to new records.
But with a small change we can fix that. Let’s have a look at the “Clone” UI Action.
To copy the Activity UI Layout record the copyRecord method from PlaybookUtil is used (line 33). This method already takes a parameter (newFields) which lets you specify your own values for specific fields. This is already used to assign another name to the new record (line 13).
So why not use this to specify a new value for protection policy?
With this small change, cloning Activity UI Layouts will work again in Zurich.
