Task names exported to csv with carriage return displays over two rows

Products

• Clarity PPM On Premise
• Clarity PPM SaaS

Issue/Introduction

When a Task Name includes line breaks, these line breaks lead to a data shift and then columns are sorted incorrectly after 
doing an export to CSV from Global Task page in Clarity MUX.
This affects summation of EAC and BCWS computation in CSV export when opened in Excel

 

Steps To Reproduce:

 

1. Create a Task in a Project that contains a line break eg: 
   - 'BBBB AAAAAA and of 
      fields gives unexpected outcome  ZZZZZZZZZZZ'
2. Task displays as a single row in Clarity with no line break which is okay.
3. Navigate to global Task page in Clarity MUX and observe that the task displays on single row.
4. On global Task page in Clarity MUX, click on 'Export to CSV' button to generate CSV file
5. Open the CSV file with a text editor like Notepad++

 

Expected: The task created in step 1 will be displayed on a single row

Actual: The task name is displayed over two rows leading to data shift

Environment

Clarity 16.3.1, 16.3.2

Cause

DE173436

Resolution

This has been determined not to be a bug.

If we open the exported csv file with Excel, we see line break in the same column only, so we do not see any data shift.
If we open the exported csv file with Notepad++, we see line breaks lead to a data shift. 

The difference in behavior between Excel and Notepad++ is due to how these applications interpret CSV formatting standards:

Excel Interpretation: Excel correctly handles CSV files that follow RFC 4180 standards, where line breaks within quoted fields are preserved as content rather than row separators. When our system exports text fields containing carriage returns, it properly escapes them within quoted CSV fields ("content with\nline breaks"), which Excel interprets correctly.

Notepad++ Interpretation: Notepad++ treats all line breaks as row separators regardless of CSV quoting rules, leading to the apparent "data shift"