Rich Text Format (RTF) columns data alignment when Exporting to CSV

Products

• Clarity PPM On Premise
• Clarity PPM SaaS

Issue/Introduction

Exporting Rich Text Format (RTF) columns into CSV causes data to scatter across lines. The content of the field is scattered across the number of lines the RTF field occupies.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:

1. Login to Clarity as administration
2. Navigate to Classic UX --> Studio --> Objects -->  Project object
3. At the Attributes tab, create a Rich Text Field (RTF) type attribute and provide the API_Attribute value
4. Go to the Modern UX --> Blueprints and add the field to the project blueprint.
5. On a project associated to the blueprint above, add some content on the created Rich Text Format (RTF) field
6. Go to the project list view add the Rich Text Format (RTF) field to the view and save the view
7. Now export the list view to CSV

Expected Results: The content of each line exported to be placed on a single row

Actual Results: The RTF column content is scattered across several lines

Environment

Any Clarity release

Cause

This was analyzed by Engineering through DE60014 and determined its working as design

Resolution

CSV is a simple format for representing a rectangular array (matrix) of numeric and textual values. It an example of a "flat file" format. It is a delimited data format that has fields/columns separated by the comma character %x2C (Hex 2C) and records/rows/lines separated by characters indicating a line break. RFC 4180 stipulates the use of CRLF pairs to denote line breaks, where CR is %x0D (Hex 0D) and LF is %x0A (Hex 0A). Each line should contain the same number of fields. Fields that contain a special character (comma, CR, LF, or double quote), must be "escaped" by enclosing them in double quotes (Hex 22). An optional header line may appear as the first line of the file with the same format as normal record lines. This header will contain names corresponding to the fields in the file and should contain the same number of fields as the records in the rest of the file. CSV commonly employs US-ASCII as character set, but other character sets are permitted.

Now when the exported CSV file is opened in plain text editor shows lines as wrapped. When opened with advanced editor like Numbers / Google Sheets, it shows up correctly.

This is not a Clarity problem, but linked to the tool used to open the CSV file. 

Example of Export in Advance Editors like Notepad++ export:

Example of Export in Advance Editors like Google Sheet export: