Rich text and plaintext description field behaviour

Products

• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager
• CA Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

When creating a new ticket within SDM, the description field accepts html text or rich text. 

Example:  Existing request content contains the following in the description field:

line 1 plain line 2 bold line 3 italics line 4 underline

This document describes the interaction between the plain text and html rich text versions of the description field

Environment

Release:  17.4 RU2 or higher
CA Service Desk Manager

Resolution

In the above example, if one were to examine the description field in the Call_Req table for the above request ticket by running pdm_extract on the ticket entry, in this case request 59:

pdm_extract -f "Select ref_num, description from Call_Req where ref_num = '59'"

The resultant content on the description field would show

line 1 plain\\0012line 2 bold\\0012line 3 italics\\0012line 4 underline

Conversely, if one were to examine the html_description field in the Call_Req table for the above request ticket:

pdm_extract -f "Select ref_num, html_description from Call_Req where ref_num = '59'"

The resultant content on the html_description field would show

<p>line 1 plain</p><p><strong>line 2 bold</strong></p><p><i>line 3 italics</i></p><p><u>line 4 underline</u></p>

When a new ticket is created/copied, the html_description field is what is seen by the end users, which contains the html tags that are used to express the rich text formatting (bold, italics, underline).  However, the backend description field will contain a version of the same text that lacks the rich text formatting.  The "\\0012" code is the octal ASCII code that is commonly used to express a newline entry.

Additional Information

See also:  KB Article 372582:  Rich text Description field display functionality

HTML Tag listings (external)

ASCII code table (external)