this video will look at how to stop checklists from adding work notes every time you do something in a checklist so I'm logged into my demo instant my PDI rather and I have this requested item and I put the checklist formatter in here so that I could add checklists to request items so I'm going to go ahead in the checklist I'm going to create a new one and I'm going to say do this then do that so each time I did that if I go back to the activity formatter I can see that there was a work node created for every action that I did checklist created checklist uh item added do this do that Etc um so I guess well in and of itself I mean it's not terrible but it does crowd up the work notes with this uh with your checklist activity and unfortunately they didn't servicenow did not create a separate journal entry for checklist instead they just threw it in the work notes so there's no way to filter that out um so if you have actual pertinent work notes in here with your colleagues telling you giving you pertinent information here that can get drowned out by uh this barrage of of checklist activity going on here so what we're going to look at is how to cut this out how to stop it from uh adding work notes every time I do something so to do that there's actually a business rule let's just take a look quickly at the structure of checklists there are two main tables for checklists the checklist table which contains the parent every time I do a create new checklist it creates a record in here and links to the task record that the checklist is created in and then the checklist if I go in here and actually I should configure this related list see if we can find right has checklist items uh so here are the checklist item records that get created under the individual checklist so if we go to one of these records or actually we don't even have to I think we can just go here and we can do business rules on this table there is a business rule called add work note for checklist item crud so that's exactly what's happening every time I create um update or delete it is adding a work note so we'll go into this business rule and if you have some specific requirements you can go in here and uh and and edit this uh so say for example you want to turn it off on certain tables but not other ones you can go ahead and and mess around in there if you just want to shut it off altogether just turn that business rule off so now we'll go back to our requested items and I guess which one was I in here any one of them okay so this is what I did before and let's start checking these and nothing gets added let's say I remove the whole darn thing and I create another one ah okay so my adding of items uh was was turned off but what I didn't turn off is the checklist one so let's go back to the checklist table and let's go to the business rules on the checklist table and here we have the same kind of deal so this is creating a a work note every time I create or delete a checklist so we'll just shut that sucker off too and now we should be completely clean we'll go back to a requested item and let's remove this checklist let's add another checklist and we go here and it didn't add any records um so just one more thing on this topic so let's say you do that and now people are creating checklists and then you get into a Witch Hunt situation where who modified my checklist you get that kind of question uh so you can't go to the work notes anymore because we shut those things off so if you have a kind of audit that you need to go uh on a on a whodunit mission you can always go to that checklist table again that's just a checklist.list and go find the whatever record it's on actually let's uh do it by updated we'll find the most recent one the one I've been messing around in yeah this one okay uh so uh you do have some information about who completed it um and when it was completed so you have your update date time and completed by you also have who created it right all the usual stuff that you have on records uh if it was deleted you're not going to have that information right so if you're deleting items out of a checklist or you're deleting the checklist altogether uh you're not going to have that information but you can get uh who who created it and who completed it and and what time they did it so there is some audit information available um you know maybe not as great as the work notes would give you uh if you had an entry in the work notes every time something happened but to be honest with you I I don't see how that's useful having that in the work notes it's just it crowds up the work notes and uh God forbid you have somebody on the watch list uh they're going to get an email notification every time somebody checks off a uh checks off an item in that list so I think shutting that stuff down is uh is the best solution and uh you can get some additional audit stuff in here if ever you need it but the you know the idea of checklist is really just like a supplemental informational uh piece for the fulfiller and the record and it's not really meant as a um a sort of record of what happened uh it's really just informational and to help the fulfiller but if we want to know what happened and who was doing what uh then we use regular fields for that namely the State field and any other fields uh for that kind of stuff so that is um how to turn that annoying work notes off in checklists