Virtual Agent Emoji's not appearing in Test Instances, Working in Developer Instance

[Hayden Reid]

Hello!

I seem to be unable to push emoji's from our Developer instance into our test instance, but the text following or afterwards is present. The emojis work just fine in the developer instance when testing. When I look up the sys_message_ui table I see some odd values being passed into the "Target Name" field. In customer updates the target name also contains the same. I assume this has something to do with the way the UTF-8 characters are being translated by the system but I haven't been able to think up a way to troubleshoot this issue. 

From the documentation: String (Full UTF-8) String field that contains UTF-8 character encoding. This field type is restricted to the same maximum length that can be defined within the application UI as the String data type. Emojis are supported in the String (Full UTF-8) field type. 

I only assume that the "Bot Response" utility has this same encoding... appreciate thoughts & suggestions for next steps.. 

Thank you!

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><record_update table="sys_ui_message"><sys_ui_message action="INSERT_OR_UPDATE"><application>Virtual Agent</application><code/><commented_message/><key>this is a test with emoji following text �?��</key><language>en</language><message>this is a test with emoji following text </message><sys_class_name>sys_ui_message</sys_class_name><sys_created_by>haydenreid</sys_created_by><sys_created_on>2022-09-14 17:09:04</sys_created_on><sys_customer_update>false</sys_customer_update><sys_id>298606b71b7911108b5c0e12604bcb5d</sys_id><sys_mod_count>0</sys_mod_count><sys_name>this is a test with emoji following text �?��</sys_name><sys_package display_value="HR Service Delivery Virtual Agent Conversations" source="sn_hr_va">c8c5545573d8130000e588e54cf6a71a</sys_package><sys_policy/><sys_replace_on_upgrade>false</sys_replace_on_upgrade><sys_scope display_value="HR Service Delivery Virtual Agent Conversations">c8c5545573d8130000e588e54cf6a71a</sys_scope><sys_update_name>sys_ui_message_298606b71b7911108b5c0e12604bcb5d</sys_update_name><sys_updated_by>haydenreid</sys_updated_by><sys_updated_on>2022-09-14 17:09:04</sys_updated_on></sys_ui_message></record_update>

[Chris D]

Same issue here - emoji isn't preserved when moving update sets - I had observed this last year so it's sad to see the issue still hasn't been fixed.

As the workaround, I simply manually re-added the emoji to the VA topic (and re-published) in the environments after the update set was moved. And then I gave up on emojis because they sadly weren't worth the hassle (or bad development practice) 😞
*edit: turns out they don't support emoji here on the community either lol*

I never submitted a case to ServiceNow though - perhaps you can submit one and see what they say?

If they end up telling you it's not an issue (they want to fix), post it on the Idea Portal here and I'll gladly upvote. I really hope they don't tell you that because they went out of their way to add emoji and it's clearly not working as expected, but I've been disappointed before...

[Hayden Reid]

Thanks for the information Chris. I'll go ahead and submit a case to the ServiceNow team and update you once i've heard back. 

I'll make sure to loop around on the Idea Portal depending on the response. Keep you posted.

Hayden

[Hayden Reid · Accepted solution]

Hi again Chris. Turns out that the following system properties (sys_properties) need to be set to value 'true':

glide.util.xml.transformer.donot_strip.utf16_surrogate_pairs
glide.util.xml.transformer.handle.utf16_surrogate_pairs

Changing these values resolved the emoji issue for us.

Cheers,

Hayden

[Chris D]

Ah yes, duh, how could we not know that!

Looks like neither of those properties exist in our instance or my personal instance (both San Diego) - did you have to create them too?