Rich Text/HTML for Ticket Descriptions

Tim_Votta

Our old Helpdesk platform allowed for HTML in the body of tickets.  Staff would often use this for pasting images or hyperlinks into ticket descriptions.  After moving to Cireson and SCSM we are seriously missing this capability that we have been accustomed to having for years.  

Attachments are able to work around the problem but it is much easier to be able to paste a picture in context of a ticket description rather than having to attach images and view them separately.  Saving emails as .eml provides some relief but Rich Text/HTML support on the portal for the ticket description would be a big improvement.

Tom_Hendricks

For the fields that have an RTF data type, you can the property from "string" to "editor" in your custom form files.  This is effective within the portal, for fields that you do not want to include in any Data Warehouse reports, for example.  (Otherwise, you would need code there to parse and strip out the tags or users who prefer "View Source" to the "Reader" view in their browser )

I consider my explanation to be a workaround and am glad to see this submitted as a feature request, but wanted to share for those who may find it useful.

Eugene_Rack

Has anyone heard if  Cireson are looking at the description field being HTML enabled. The rendering of text when someone emails our Service Desk mailbox does look good if HTML sent in.

David_Wells

We have also had a request for Action log comments to be able to render hyperlinks et al

Tom_Hendricks

David_Wells said:

We have also had a request for Action log comments to be able to render hyperlinks et al

There is a good one that cannot be solved with the kendo Editor control, that I am aware of.  (I don't consider rendering each row as an Editor to be a good solution....)

@David_wells, do you see this as being similar to how phone numbers are rendered as links in mobile browsers, for example, or as something else?

I also want to add (as I should have at the time) that my solution that I posted above in August does have its drawbacks.  All of your HTML tags behind the scenes are eating up characters that contribute to reaching the character limit (typically 4000 on some of the Change fields, but can be as small as 256 or 500 for others).  Likewise, images would be base64 encoded, which can consume a huge number of characters.  Some process is needed to help get the benefit while managing the shortcomings.

David_Wells

@Tom_Hendricks - Use case as part of analyst / user action log interaction - Analyst: which web page cant you access, User: this one http://blah.blah

Analyst wants click on hyper link in action log rather than copy and pasting it into their browser.

So anything that reduces the number of clicks for the analyst.

Tom_Hendricks

This definitely clarifies things.  I thought you meant the Description field of the ticket.  You actually mean the Action Log.

It requires customization.  However, it seems completely plausible to use JQuery or JS to find text in the Action Log (the element rendered on the page, not the ViewModel) and replace it with a URL wrapped inside of <a href="http://blah.blah" target="_blank">.

Adrian_Paech

@Tom_Hendricks I cant seem to find the solution you posted in August?

Did you happen to post a solution which already converts the action log to Rich Text?

If you did, I would be keen to have a look! can you post a link?

I was thinking about doing the same thing on the description field, but extending the class with an additional field which can handle 65000 characters. Unfortunately this means it will not be storable in the datawarehouse, but I was thinking that I could get around this, by copying this field with a cut-down version of the rich text description, and placing this cut down version within the existing description field. This would also require stripping out all of the related HTML tags.

After reading this article though, I am thinking about just getting the rich text stuff working with the Action log only. As then I wont need to extend any classes to get it working.

Cheers,

Adrian

Tom_Hendricks

@Adrian_Paech, That is because I do not think I actually posted it--I merely described it.  I can fix that here. 

You are thinking about this correctly, however.  You will want to extend your property, and yes, it does mean that it will not be available for reporting in the DW.  With the fields that we chose, it was decided that this was not important.

My earlier solution is quite simply this, using the Implementation Plan field on the CR form, as an example:

Change this:

{ DataType: "LongString", PropertyDisplayName: "ImplementationPlan", PropertyName: "ImplementationPlan", minLength: 0, maxLength: 4000 }

To this:

{ DataType: "Editor", PropertyDisplayName: "ImplementationPlan", PropertyName: "ImplementationPlan", minLength: 0, maxLength: 4000, Required: true }

Again, it is not without tradeoffs, but it may be the right fit for some teams.  I did have to write custom code to make sure that these fields are not editable on a closed ticket, and also to show the validation error when the field is required but was not filled in on save, as two examples.

None of this addresses the action log, of course.  My current opinion there is that parsing the text of the action log and replacing the text in the DOM element with links as appropriate is the best approach.  I am intrigued by this and would like to find time to attempt it, but I have other priorities at the moment.  If it has not been attempted by anyone else over the next couple weeks, I may take a look at it before the end of the month.

Adrian_Paech

Thanks Tom!
much appreciated!
Any chance you could post an example of how you handled the required field validation?
i haven't quite figured out how to do this yet.
Cheers,
Adrian

Tom_Hendricks

For validation, you can mark the field Required: true and it will be respected (and the label will say "required").  However, it will not highlight if it was not filled in.

Handling this is very tricky.  It makes sense when you see it, but it took me a while to figure it out.  Lots of time spent looking at the Kendo docs.

I just posted this at: https://community.cireson.com/discussion/2220/show-validation-failures-on-kendo-editor-controls/p1?new=1

It should probably live its own life over there instead of continuing to hijack this feature request.

Nick_Flint

Is it possible to change the DataType property of the description field on activities to get the editor there too?

Tom_Hendricks

@Nick_Flint that is a great question.  I have not seen a good way to customize the activities other than to use CSS to hide fields, for example.  It looks like the activities may be getting some attention in a future update, according to the product roadmap (unless I am imagining things, which is possible!)