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. 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
  Create a playbook to set up an automated business process. Use Playbook builder in Workflow Studio to add stages, activities, triggers, and runtime permissions, then activate the playbook to make it available to agents and fulfillers.
• 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.
• Enabling playbook restart
  Learn how playbook restart during runtime works and how restart rules control the behavior of stages and activities during a restarted run.
• 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.
• Add translations for playbooks
  Make playbooks available in multiple languages during runtime, to support worldwide business processes.
• View all buttons without hover
  View all buttons in a playbook diagram by default, without the need to hover or select any element.