ServiceDesk ticket description is cutting off

Products

• ServiceDesk

Issue/Introduction

The customer has a couple of tickets that have the ticket descriptions being cut off. 
The customer can get the description to show in its entirety by modifying the incident view page and unchecking the "Escape HTML Tags" checkbox.

Environment

ServiceDesk 8.5 RU4, 8.6

Cause

This is a known issue. It was determined that the reason is that the descriptions are copied from an email and has html tags embedded. For example, having the following in the ticket description:

To: Technical Support <[email protected]>

Looking at the actual description on the page, it just showed "Technical Support" and not the actual HTML reference of the email address with its tags. Looking at the "ImIncidentTicket_ID" table for one of those tickets, we can see the content of IncidentDescription column and the "<[email protected]>" causing the ticket description to cut if the "Escape HTML Tags" option is turned on.

The "<>" was causing to escape the rest of the description details. The actual content was fine as far as the database goes but the ticket page was escaping the rest of the string.

 

When "escape html" setting is ON in the "Description and Resolution" webpart configuration, the description field was processed as HTML and thus cut off all the invalid html tags and everything "between" them

When "escape html"  is OFF, the description field was processed "blindly" as HTML, but HTML tags cutoff principle was different and thus only the text between <>  symbols was cutoff.

Resolution

This issue has been reported to the Broadcom Development team. 

A pointfix for Workflow/ServiceDesk 8.5 RU4 is available under KB 198337  "CUMULATIVE POST ITMS 8.5 RU4 POINT FIXES". This fix will make sure the "Description" field which has no valid HTML tags is not being “cut” treated as HTML. The fix makes sure that a string is treated as HTML only if it is indeed HTML.