help Urgent Help (to me) Required - Formatting text in custom fields

[Jeremy]

So I have a form with a lot of questions and I need to send these to a manager in an email and I can get the text to appear on new lines using:

&#10
or
&#13

In the request is looks nice:

But in the email it shows the line returns...is there  a way to remove these?

I have tried \n \r <br> but they all do the same.....

[Jeremy]

any thoughts on this issue from Hornbill?

[James Ainsworth]

When you say In the request it looks nice are you referring to the questions section or within the details section?  It's not clear where you are adding the line returns.

[Jeremy]

@James Ainsworththis is displaying in custom 31 that I have added to the details of the section with line breaks, I then want to email these details (custom 31) but in the email text it includes the line breaks rather than escaping (not showing) them.

[James Ainsworth]

Thanks Jeremy.  I'll feed this back to the development team.  

[Jeremy]

Has there been any thoughts about this issue?

[James Ainsworth]

From what I've been told, the emails have two bodies, a text and an HTML.  The text body should allow for \n\r and the html body should allow for <br>.  I see that you tried these, but for now I believe we can say that &#10 or &#13 can't be used. 

 

 

 

[James Ainsworth]

When you added custom 31 to the request, do you recall which control type you selected?

[James Ainsworth]

So, without having to add any new line characters, when using the Multi-line Text Area, both the details section and the email sent from the request are showing the text stored in this field in multiple lines.  

So, the next thing to look at is how are you populating this field?

[Jeremy]

@James Ainsworth so this was added to the request details as a multi line text box, although this is unimportant to us (this was more for testing).

The custom field is updated by adding the text from the question into custom 31 if the customer answers in a particular way.

Node:

I have done more testing and it appears that the system (in the details section) recognises &#10 or &#13 but with the others it adds the information into the text box and email

email details:

 

[Jeremy]

Is there any further developments in regards to this issue? We are holding off deploying a form until we can fix this issue but it is becoming more pressing.

[Guest Ehsan]

@Jeremy,

Could you please clarify how the email is being sent? I tried the steps below and I cannot reproduce the problem.

Step 1: Added 3 lines of text (pressed ENTER at the end of line 1 and 2) to the "Custom 32 (TEXT") option option in "Requests > Update Request > Custom Fields" Hornbill Automation.

Step 2: Raised a Request against the process that I created in step 1. When viewing the Details section of the newly raised Request, I can see the text in separate lines.

Step 3: Edited the RequestMessage email template to include the "Extended Information.H_custom_32" variable.

Step 4: Opened the Request, clicked on the Email action tab, selected RequestMessage from the Template drop-down select and clicked on Send. The line breaks is still respected, when viewing the email.

Step 5: Opened the email in Microsoft Outlook - The line breaks is still respected.

I didn't add any syntax (HTML, XML or ASCII) to enforce the line breaks. Are your steps different to mine? If so, could you please provide a detailed breakdown of how you are looking to achieve the end goal (send an email to a manager)? So far, 3 Hornbill members have second guessed the scenario described here, so it would be good to get some clarity on this.

Kind regards,

Ehsan

[Jeremy]

@Ehsan same steps as you apart from Number 2 where we have decisions to check if the customer has answered a question in a certain way then we inject the question into the custom field, so the custom field can have anything from 1 question to 20 dependent on answers.

So it appears to be when you inject multiple text lines into the custom field that this happens, below is part of the questions decision tree that updates custom 31 with the relevant details:

[Guest Ehsan]

@Jeremy,

So in my process, I added "Requests > Get Request Information > Progressive Capture Answers" Hornbill Automation, followed by the "Requests > Update Request > Custom Fields" Hornbill Automation.

I then added the question and the answer using the Variable Picker option for the Custom 32 (TEXT) option.

 

Those two questions in my screenshot are configured as below.

 

Having raised a Request, I can see that the custom field is updated. The email is presented correctly as below when I used my previously configured template to send an email. 

 

If your steps are different to mine, could you please elaborate.

Ehsan

 

[Jeremy]

@Ehsan that is correct but you are adding all the text in one go, but we have decisions based on 20 questions then we update the custom field with the text therefore the text gets entered in multiple nodes and so the system does not format each question onto a new line as you have done (this has been raised before).

So in the custom field it ends up looking like:

Which option did you pick? Yes Have you checked the forum? Found a related topic in the forum

But as we want this text to be on different lines that is where we are getting stuck in adding the line break into the custom field. Which we have done and it works, but the email shows the line breaks.

It maybe easier to show you if you wanted?

[Victor]

4 hours ago, Jeremy said:

we want this text to be on different lines that is where we are getting stuck in adding the line break into the custom field. Which we have done and it works, but the email shows the line breaks.

@Jeremy use an invisible character. For each addition to the custom field that will hold the final text put an ALT+255 on the first line, like this:

The "dot" you can see in the screenshot highlighted, is the ALT+255 character. To obtain it just press ALT (keep it pressed while typing 255 on keyboard using the numeric keys on the right hand side of the keyboard)

Here is an example of the result, I have two update nodes on Customer 32, one adds text "Value 1" the other adds "Value 2" (as append):

Request timeline:

Email sent viewed from Hornbill:

Email received in Outlook:

Hope this helps.

[Guest Ehsan]

@JeremyThanks, that helped to recreate it. @Victor's suggestion above should help to address the issue.

Ehsan

[Jeremy]

@Victor I will give this a go, @Ehsan will this be looked into to resolve at some point in the future?

[Guest Ehsan]

@Jeremy, Victor's suggestion is the solution for this scenario. We cannot add space by default as other customers may not have the same expectation when appending text as per your example.