Adding Multiple Lines/Line Breaks to a Description using Flow Designer

[kevclark]

This is just a quick article which I hope people will find useful.

I was using Flow Designer to populate a task record's Description field using the "Create Task Record" action that comes with the Flow Designer Service Catalog plugin.

I needed to insert line-breaks into the Description field so that I could separate fields from the Catalog Variables - for example:

Do something with this Widget.

Name of submitter: <variables.submitter>

Name of widget: <variables.widgetname>

After getting some helpful suggestions online (hi SNdevs!) I found a solution for adding line breaks was to encapsulate the entire string (including data pills) in a Javascript string using \n line breaks. 

For example, the syntax for the above description would be:

javascript: "Do something with this Widget. \n Name of Submitter: {{submitter data pill}} \n Name of Widget: {{widgetname data pill}}"

I hope someone else finds this useful!  

[LaurentChicoine]

Thanks a lot for sharing, this will be really useful to me for Automated tests (ATF). I didn't have a good way to validate multi-line fields and was forced to make multiple contains condition for every line which is not the same as testing for the exact string.

Edit: After further usage, ATF validations require to use \r\n for a new line instead of simply \n.

[hnie]

Thanks for sharing 🙂

I can see that we have changed our "Description" field years ago to a HTML field rather than the ootb string.

Result is that the following is printed in the description field when the catalog task is created:

<p data-tinymcerootblock

Any ideas on how to work around it?

[kevclark]

I'm not entirely sure, but you may need to construct the entire value in the whatever the desired target HTML needs to be, so something like:

javascript:"<span>hello world</span></ br>this is the next line.</ br>then the next line.</ br>" 

[hnie]

Hey,

I managed to get this to work - You just need to Shift+Enter when adding a new line in the HTML field in the flow designer - Then it actually works! 🙂

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-platform-administration/page/use/using-forms/concept/c_InsertALineBreak.html

[kevclark]

Nice!  Will have to test next time I'm working in Flow Designer.

[Meshia]

thanks so much. This was sooooooo helpful Kev.

[bpolo]

Hi Kev

This was super helpful for me too ... Thanks very much!!!

[Team Carl]

Thanks for this - I used it on the Virtual Agent, which worked like a dream!

javascript: "Some text\n\nDescription: {{vaInputs.description}} \n\nSome more text"