< and > Character Present in User Input Corrupts Work Item

Nick_Flint

We have a request offering that prompts the user for a subject and description. These prompts are mapped to the Title and Description properties of the work item. Over the last several weeks we have been experiencing an issue where if the user includes the < or > characters in the description field the work item is corrupted. Not only are we unable to open the work item in the analyst portal; but trying to open the work item in the SCSM console crashes the entire console application. This happens when an e-mail address is copy/pasted from Outlook (the email address is enclosed in <>).

Currently I'm creating a new work item manually with the problem characters excluded. Has anyone else experienced and mitigated this?

Peter_Miklian

@Nick_Flint we are experiencing exactly the same issue for more than week on version 9.3.8 and 9.3.9.

@Gabriel_Lences told me that Cireson has a PR related to <undefined> inputs in UserInput attribute opened so I hoped they'd release new portal version soon and wanted to check if this would be fixed, too and if not, create IR for Cireson. I'm glad that it's not our local issue and it happens in your environment, too

@Shane_White maybe you could check if you really have PR/IR about this? Or should we log it? Thanks.

Peter_Miklian

@Jeffrey_Pattison yesterday was released new portal 9.4.0 (Latest + Baseline) and I received notification from Cireson:

The PR this incident is related to has been marked as released.  
                There should be a new version available at http://softwaredownloads.cireson.com.  Please install the new version to verify that the issue has been resolved. 

We upgraded our lab environment and tested. This bug seems to be fixed for new tickets but existing faulty tickets are not fixed and still cause portal/console crashing. I'm writing to Cireson if we can expect some fix for already existing ticket, too. I can imagine some PowerShell to find them and fix maybe?

Peter_Miklian

@Nick_Flint we are experiencing exactly the same issue for more than week on version 9.3.8 and 9.3.9.

@Gabriel_Lences told me that Cireson has a PR related to <undefined> inputs in UserInput attribute opened so I hoped they'd release new portal version soon and wanted to check if this would be fixed, too and if not, create IR for Cireson. I'm glad that it's not our local issue and it happens in your environment, too

@Shane_White maybe you could check if you really have PR/IR about this? Or should we log it? Thanks.

Nick_Flint

@Peter_Miklian - Thanks for confirming that. I guess it's true that misery loves company; especially if it's due to a software bug!

Peter_Miklian

@Nick_Flint check https://softwaredownloads.cireson.com/#/ , new release v9.3.10 with lot of fixes including 'undefined' UserInputs is out :)

We tried to upgrade portal to latest version in lab but the <> issue is still there.

I just created IR87739.

Jeffrey_Pattison

Have you received any updates on your incident ticket @Peter_Miklian? I've just had analysts start reporting the issue in our environment as well.

Peter_Miklian

@Jeffrey_Pattison yesterday was released new portal 9.4.0 (Latest + Baseline) and I received notification from Cireson:

The PR this incident is related to has been marked as released.  
                There should be a new version available at http://softwaredownloads.cireson.com.  Please install the new version to verify that the issue has been resolved. 

We upgraded our lab environment and tested. This bug seems to be fixed for new tickets but existing faulty tickets are not fixed and still cause portal/console crashing. I'm writing to Cireson if we can expect some fix for already existing ticket, too. I can imagine some PowerShell to find them and fix maybe?

Jeffrey_Pattison

Thanks for the update, much appreciated!

I've been using PowerShell and SQL to identify the broken tickets (thankfully we map all our user input into the work item description so it's easy to target) but I haven't tried to fix them in any way, just recreate minus the special characters.

Peter_Miklian

@Jeffrey_Pattison yes, this is exactly what I wanted to do in case Cireson won't provide any fix for broken tickets: use PS to identify them, pull UserInput, manually recreate them and close existing faulty tickets. But I have no clue how to identify them. Is searching for <,> characters in UserInput/mapped to Description enough?

Could you provide your scripts & SQL queries? @Shane_White is assigned to my IR about this, maybe he/Cireson developers would appreciate them and so will other customers :) Thank you.

Jeffrey_Pattison

So far doing the search for < and > has been enough for me. The relatively small time-frame since the issue started helps.

To get the list of SR that might have the issue I use a really basic SQL query against the SERVICEMANAGER database, then use PowerShell (including SMLets) to get the UserInput and Description values.

The script and query are really basic bits from much larger pieces I used for other work, but have been enough for me, here they are:

script and query used for hunting corrupt tickets.zip

Peter_Miklian

Thank you @Jeffrey_Pattison . I will still need to write new PS script for our environment because our UserInput -> Description failed as UserInput in faulty ticket seems not to be correct xml, but maybe other Cireson Customers would appreciate it.

I will wait a few days for Cireson answer in hope they would provide some complex fix for this issue.