Playbooks in Workflow Studio

Playbooks are ServiceNow AI Platform® representations of cross-enterprise processes for your organization. Create and activate a playbook to run your digitized business process on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

Each playbook that you design in Workflow Studio has a trigger, a sequence of stages, and a sequence of activities.

You can view your list of Playbooks by navigating Process Automation > Workflow Studio > Playbooks. Opening a playbook allows you to edit it. If there are no playbooks in the list, you can create a new one by clicking New and selecting Playbook. For more information on creating a playbook, see create a process definition.

Properties

After you create a playbook, access its properties by opening it, and selecting Properties in the More actions menu in the upper right corner of the header. In the Additional properties modal, you can edit the following information:

Field	Description
Label	Name of the playbook to display in Workflow Studio and in a Playbook Experience.
Description	Description of what your playbook does.
Conditions	Conditions that must be met to run your playbook.
Run my trigger	Option that defines how many times your trigger can run for your playbook. Choices include: Once: Triggers the playbook once for the life of the triggering input record. For each unique change: Triggers the playbook for every unique update to a non-system field even if the flow is currently running. The system stores a history of every change to a record and determines whether the change is unique. For example, if an incident record's State field changes from In Progress to On Hold, the playbook runs. However, if the State field then changes back to In Progress, the playbook doesn't run. Note: Playbooks that have a trigger that runs For each unique change can produce recursions when run in a non-interactive session. When such playbooks make a change to the trigger record, the change meets the playbook's trigger conditions and causes a recursion. Only if not currently running: Triggers the playbook for every unique change if a process execution is not currently running. For every update: Triggers the playbook every time the input record is updated, regardless of whether there has already been or there currently are any running process executions.
Run on extended	Option to trigger your playbook when record operations occur on tables that extend the input table. For example, if your selected table is the Task [task] table and you select this option, your playbook triggers when a Problem [problem] record is created or updated. For more information, see Table extension and classes.

Note:

After you create a playbook, you can't change the trigger's input table or trigger type. For more information, see Triggers.

Design considerations

Refer to these design considerations when working with playbooks:

Avoid duplicating business logic used in Workflow Studio, Workflow, and business rules

Replace separate business logic such as business rules, flows, and workflows with a consolidated playbook. Make sure that you deactivate any external business logic you replace to avoid duplication of effort.

Ignore records added or updated by import and update sets

Record triggers ignore records added or updated by applying an update set or importing an XML file. These operations apply to the entire application or table rather than an individual record.

• Create a playbook
  Enable playbook owners to configure and organize multiple instances of Workflow Studio content into an automated business process on the ServiceNow AI Platform®.
• Playbook variants
  Use one playbook for multiple scenarios.
• Test a playbook
  Verify that your playbook works as expected by running the playbook with test trigger data. Identify and resolve all errors before activating your playbook.
• Restart
  Give agents and fulfillers the ability to restart a playbook, stage, or activity.
• Duplicate Playbooks
  Make a copy of an existing playbook with the same trigger, stages, activities, and experience configurations as the original. Edit the duplicated playbook to quickly create a working variation.