Playbook Experience

Understand how Playbook work in the ServiceNow AI Platform® to automate cross-functional processes and consolidate them into task-oriented views for your end users.

All > Process Automation > Workflow Studio > Playbooks is the design environment where playbook owners build playbooks. Meanwhile, the runtime experience is where end users, such as playbook agents, follow the playbook to complete a business process. To learn more about the Playbook designer, see Playbook builder.

Runtime experience

Workflow Studio produces these runtime components for Playbooks:

Process executions

A process execution stores the details of running a playbook in a context record. You can use a process execution to troubleshoot and verify that playbooks run as expected.

Activity executions

An activity execution stores the details of running an activity instance in a context record. You can use an activity execution to troubleshoot and verify that playbooks run as expected.

Playbook runtime

Playbook runtime is when a playbook runs for an agent or fulfiller. A playbook runs for agents only after Playbook Experience administrators configure how and where the playbook appears.

During runtime for a playbook, your instance:

1. Evaluates any conditions specified in the trigger definition and processes the trigger.
2. Processes the Events and starts running the playbook in the background.
3. Builds the automation plans from each activity into an entire process plan.
4. Runs the process plan for your playbook.
5. Stores the process execution information in the Process Execution [sys_pd_context] table.
6. Provides data for the running playbook view that agents and fulfillers experience.

Figure 1. Playbook processing

Your instance processes a playbook during runtime by evaluating trigger conditions, processing the event in the queue, building and running a process plan, storing process execution details, and providing data for the Playbook Experience.

Data security and HTML sanitization

Playbooks protects against cross-site scripting and code injection by evaluating all string data for HTML markup. The system only preserves HTML markup that is present in its inclusion list. All other HTML markup is removed from string data.

The inclusion list supports these HTML elements and attributes, which cannot be modified.

Table 1. HTML inclusion list

HTML element	Included Attributes
a	class, href, target, title
abbr	class, title
address	class
area	alt, class, coords, href, shape
article	class
aside	class
audio	autoplay, class, controls, loop, preload, src
b	class
bdi	class, dir
bdo	class, dir
big	class
blockquote	cite, class
br	class
caption	class
center	class
cite	class
code	class
col	align, class, span, valign, width
colgroup	align, class, span, valign, width
dd	class
del	class, datetime
details	class, open
div	class
dl	class
dt	class
em	class
emp	class
font	class, color, face, size
footer	class
h1	class
h2	class
h3	class
h4	class
h5	class
h6	class
header	class
hr	class
html
i	class
img	alt, class, height, src, title, width
input	aria-label, class, type, value
ins	class, datetime
li	class
mark	class
nav	class
ol	class
p	class
pre	class
s	class
section	class
small	class
span	class
sub	class
sup	class
svg	class
strong	class
style
table	align, border, class, valign, width
tag	class
tbody	align, class, valign
td	align, class, colspan, rowspan, valign, width
tfoot	align, class, valign
th	align, class, colspan, rowspan, valign, width
thead	align, class, valign
tr	align, class, rowspan, valign
tt	class
u	class
ul	class
video	autoplay, class, controls, height, loop, preload, src, width