Work Notes Activity Stream loses formatting for some large pasted email content in CSW

[HimanshuS876326]

Hi everyone,

I'm investigating an issue with Work Notes in Customer Service Management and wanted to see if anyone has experienced something similar.

Issue

Our users manually copy and paste long email conversations from Outlook into the Work Notes field and also attach the original email to the case.

For some Work Notes, after clicking "Content not loaded because it is very large" (which I understand is expected ServiceNow behavior), the email is displayed as one long block of text with most paragraph formatting lost, making it difficult to read.

However, in the same case, other large Work Notes display correctly with proper line breaks and paragraph spacing.

Investigation performed

• The "Content not loaded because it is very large" message is expected behavior and is not the issue.
• Compared a good Work Note and a bad Work Note.
• Both are stored in the sys_journal_field table.
• Both sys_journal_field.value fields contain the expected line breaks and formatting.
• Character counts are similar:
  • Good Work Note: ~14,948 characters
  • Bad Work Note: ~16,000 characters
• The content is not truncated.
• The issue occurs only when viewing the Work Note in the Activity Stream.
• Tested in Australia (DEV) and observed the issue in Yokohama (PROD).

Question

Has anyone experienced inconsistent rendering of large Work Notes in the Activity Stream where:

• The sys_journal_field.value contains correctly formatted text,
• But the Activity Stream displays one Work Note correctly while another appears as a single continuous block of text?

Is this a known platform limitation, rendering issue, or is there any configuration or property that affects how large Work Notes are rendered?

Any guidance or similar experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[Hanna_G]

Hi @HimanshuS876326, 

The only thing i can think of is the system property: glide.max_activity_size
This can control the limit at which text gets truncated, and may support the cause. Note that this may impact performance, especially with this being a common theme. 

More information here: Default glide.max_activity_size value can break Activity Formatter when long HTML is in place - Know...

My main thought would be whether or not this process could be done differently & what benefit the user has copying in email content to the platform - could the activity not be generated from the platform so any updates automatically populate? Or having the end user include your ServiceNow instance email address and use inbound actions to map? Could save time for end user, and for you not having to troubleshoot these issues 🙂 

[HimanshuS876326]

Hi,

A glide.max_activity_size is not in my properties List. I'm using the Yokohama feature of ServiceNow.

Thanks

[Hanna_G]

Hello, 

The article that I linked shows you how to create the property to see if this resolves the issue.