Issue with Multiline Text Fields Not Populating from Standard Change Templates

[saichary]

Problem Statement:

Recently, our team encountered an issue where some multiline text fields were not getting populated when a Standard Change Request was created using a Standard Change Template, even though the template itself had the values defined for those fields.

 

Issue Investigation

Upon investigation, we discovered the following:

• There is an existing Business Rule (Apply standard change template) responsible for populating the fields on the change record when a Standard Change Template is applied.

• This Business Rule interprets the template field-value pairs in the format:

  field_name=value

• However, for some fields—specifically multiline text fields—the field mapping in the template XML had values using:

  field_name^startswith^value

• Due to this incorrect operator (^startswith), the multiline field values were not being correctly evaluated or populated during template application.

We tested this scenario with newly created templates, and the issue did not occur, indicating this behavior was likely due to legacy or malformed data in older templates.

 

Resolution Provided by ServiceNow

ServiceNow Support confirmed that this issue can occur when older templates contain ^startswith conditions in their field mappings. Their recommendation was:

Resolution Steps:

1. Export the affected lis of Standard Change Templates as XML file.

• Navigate to the list view of the std_change_template table (Standard Change Templates) in your ServiceNow instance.

• Personalize the list layout by adding the Template field (if it’s not already visible).

• Apply a filter where the Template field Contains startswith any value (e.g.,*startswith).

• This will return a list of templates that may be affected by the ^startswith issue in the field mapping.

1. Open the XML file(s) and search for any field mappings using:

   ^startswith

2. Replace those occurrences with the correct operator:

   =

   Example:

   field_name^startswith^This is my text

   should be replaced with:

   field_name=This is my text

3. Re-import the corrected XML file back into Standard Change Template table.

This change ensures that the Business Rule evaluates the fields correctly and populates the multiline text fields as expected when the template is applied.

Please drop your feedback below.

Best Regards,
Sai

[RaghavSh]

Instead of doing import xml, from the step where you are applying the filter "Template field Contains startswith any value (e.g.,*startswith)" 

1. Copy the encoded query.

2. Run the background script/ fix script to replace "field_name^startswith" with "field_name=".

3. Update the records.

Updating xml and reimporting will be more tedious then just a simple background script.