Change Additional Comments and Work Notes to HTML?

josh_tessaro · ‎06-17-2015

Our management and user base wants to be able to insert inline images into Additional Comments and work notes and have them display correctly in the journal (Activity log). This is something that our previous system did well and which is missing in ServiceNow.

I am looking for a way to do this as seamlessly as possible. I have followed this guide: Implementing HTML in Comments - ServiceNow Wiki, with both Work Notes and additional comments, however I am having some issues.

1. Things entered in the new fields are correctly transferring to the OOB comments and work_notes fields and displaying html formatting with the exception of images. which are not displayed at all.

2. When attaching a suggested KB it ends up in description instead of the correct field (comments or u_comments) as the expected comments field is no longer on the form. I have looked but cannot find the logic that controls where to insert the attached KB text.

Any suggestions on how to solve the above or to better accomplish our goals?

Thanks,

-Josh

josh_tessaro · ‎07-16-2015

The below was provided mostly by ServiceNow support:

Steps to Resolution:

1) Set the field in question (or create a custom field) to Type: HTML

2) In the dictionary for the field, create an attribute for HTML Sanitize and set the value to false.

3) Create a business rule that auto inserts code tags and sets the Style to display: block

4) [OPTIONAL] I created another onDisplay business rule that wiped out the field so the content of the field did not linger.

Additional details

2. add html_sanatize=false to the attributes of the new html field.

3. add on before business rule to field

function onBefore(current, previous) {


   //If no opening [code] tag found, wrap it.


   var note = current.work_notes + "";


   if (note.indexof("[code]") == -1) {


       var wrappedNote = "[code]" + note + "[/code]";


       note = wrappedNote;


   }




   // Clunky workaround to inject style attribute into image tags.


   var noteStyle = note.replace(/\<img style\=\"/g, "\<img style\=\"display\: block\; "); 


   if (note != noteStyle) {


       current.work_notes = noteStyle;


   }


}

4. you will find that HTML fields do not clear field contents after submit so you can create an onDisplay script to clear the filed:

current.field_name = '';

NOTE: At this time this will prevent the Additional Comments block form generating correctly in notifications

Edit: fixed .replace as per Leslie's suggestion.

View solution in original post

Pradeep Sharma · ‎06-17-2015

Hi Josh,

Not sure if the below solution suggested will work or not. Can you please give it a try.

Re: Fuji - activity stop display Images

josh_tessaro · ‎06-17-2015

Pradeep,

That did not fix anything for us, in fact we are seeing similar symptoms as described in that thread.

Uncle Rob · ‎06-17-2015

Hey Josh,

If you can handle a retrain, you might consider the use of Live Feed / Collaboration in place of form based Comments / Work Notes. You can paste or drag/drop images into the window and they'll render as expected. You can also do HTML formatting but you need to wrap [code] Code Tags [/code] around the HTML.

Overall LiveFeed certainly feels like a more modern web display of threaded convo. Worth investigating?

josh_tessaro · ‎06-17-2015

Looking into that I am unable to simply drag and drop an image into the live feed but even if I could this is not really a workable solution for end users. The complexity of our ERP means users are used to submitting multiple screenshots with incidents and simply adding attachments gets messy fast.

I tried changing the work_notes and comments fields to HTML on task and it almost works. The only problem is that inline images or images contained in KBs that are attached to not appear in the activity log or as an attachment although they do show up in the outgoing email