ServiceNow recently made a gift for a development community by releasing UI Framework which enables you to build custom web components. It is a very powerful web development tool, and it comes with a number of out-of-the-box components. With no doubts, eventually, it is going to change the way you build ServiceNow applications.

Currently (April 2020) UI framework has some limitations you should be aware of. We don’t know for sure why ServiceNow impose those limitations, but unfortunately, they may seem like a showstopper for many developers and can significantly affect the adoption of the framework. Hopefully, ServiceNow will lift those limitations in the next releases.

There are two important issues:

No data-management components are available. You are locked inside of the Agent Workspace app.

No data-management components available

The ability to enter, submit and modify data is vital for business applications. Currently, UI framework does not provide components for that.

The Service Portal approach we are all familiar with (when you build a form in the native UI and then render it with Form widget on a portal) just does not work — there are no available components to render a form.

So if you have a use-case when you need to collect some data from a user or provide a form where a user can modify the existing record — you’re out of luck and need to build that form and data connection manually from scratch. That is possible and doable but may come with a lot of efforts.