Re-using Choice List Options in Fields and Variables

Choice lists are one of the basic input elements available in Service-now.com. They are very simple to personalize and add or remove any options you need for your application. Something I see fairly often is the need to use the EXACT same choices in different tables that may not be directly related as extended database tables. Another scenario is where you have a choice list defined on a standard field and you want to use that same field and its choices in a service catalog ‘Select box’ variable. Service catalog record producers often have this requirement. In these cases, you may be tempted just to manually re-create the entire list of choice list options for the new field or ‘Select box’ variable. As long as the lists are the same, you can save yourself some setup time (not to mention the ongoing headache of maintaining the same information in 2 places) by making use of the ‘Choice table’ and ‘Choice field’ options.

In order to re-use choice list field values, the first thing you’ll need to do is set up a choice list field on a standard form with corresponding values. Once that’s complete, you can simply open up the dictionary entry (to re-use for a field) or the variable definition (to re-use for a variable) for your new field or variable and select the Choice table and Choice field values for the field that you want to pull the choice values from. Shown below are a couple of screenshots showing how you could set this up to re-use choices from the ‘Category’ field on the ‘Incident’ table…the first for a Choice field and the second for a ‘Select box’ catalog variable.