Carriage returns in the Description Field are not being preserved when copied into Work Notes

[Heather White]

We upgraded to Helsinki from Eureka last week (2/17/17), and users are reporting the following:

"Prior to last week's upgrade, when changes in Description were published to Work Notes, carriage returns were preserved.

After the upgrade, they are no longer preserved in new tickets and they have been removed from old tickets."

As we skipped a few versions, I am wondering if functionality has changed dramatically.   Is there a way to control the text so that the carriage returns from the Description are kept when brought into work notes?

Thank you,

Heather White

[Joe McCarty1]

I think you are being affected by this known problem (ServiceNow KB: PRB668424: Line breaks in multi-line string fields are removed in activity stream (KB... ).

The workaround is:

Create a custom field that is "Journal" type in place of the base system Description field that is "String "type.

That won't really help with historic data unless you copy it into that new field.   I don't believe the underlying data has lost the newline.   Just that the formatting is not rendered properly in the new activity log.

It may be worth calling support for more direction as it appears to be something others have run into.

[Joe McCarty1]

And I should mention it seems to specifically affect UI 16, so you can always revert to UI15 and I've verified it still works there.   Since you are coming from Eureka that may be viable, though I don't know what organizational change management issues it may cause.

You can either just enable everyone to switch and users can switch as needed or you could create a default system preference that sends everyone to UI15 (Configure roles allowed to switch between UI16 and UI15 )