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

lberthold · ‎07-17-2015

I was able to merge my two scripts and keep it working.

Thanks! This will definitely be a workaround for us - and our notifications are ok too which is good.

I had already entered a Hi ticket as well and contacted our Sales rep to see if he can get any traction moving on this issue.

But I really appreciate the workarounds you guys figured out!

Thanks!

Lori

leslie8 · ‎07-17-2015

Our notifications are also working, I did not notice any issue with that. So, I didn't need to try the separate fields for notifications as I had previously thought I might.

Josh what were the issues with your notifications? Both of us are OK with our notifications.

Anyhow we certainly owe thanks to Josh for this workaround.

Aman60 · ‎04-03-2020

Hello,

I see this post is from 5 years ago. We just migrated to SN and our management wants the same functionality where the work notes and additional comments field should accept html formatted text as input. Just checking to see if the solutions provided above worked for everyone in this thread or are there still issues with this? We are using Madrid so has anything changed in this version regarding this issue?

Ned Studt · ‎04-23-2020

Same situation here.

nikhil_001 · ‎10-08-2020

The cleaner way to do it is to add a new custom field that would replace the existing work notes field and to use that field to fill the notes.

Create new field of type HTML (u_work_notes) on task table
On form layout replace the work notes field by that new field
Create the following business rule

Name: Populate work notes from HTML

Table: Task

Advanced: True

When: before

Order: 100

Insert: true

Update: true

Filter conditions: Notes changes

Script:

(function executeRule(current, previous /*null when async*/) {

// Add your code here
current.work_notes = ("[code]" + current.u_work_notes + "[/code]" );
current.u_work_notes = "";
})(current, previous);

But you will not see the post button after that