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< and > Character Present in User Input Corrupts Work Item

Nick_FlintNick_Flint Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭

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?

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Answers

  • Nick_FlintNick_Flint Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭

    @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_MiklianPeter_Miklian Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭
    edited August 2019

    @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_PattisonJeffrey_Pattison Customer IT Monkey ✭

    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.

  • Jeffrey_PattisonJeffrey_Pattison Customer IT Monkey ✭

    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_MiklianPeter_Miklian Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭

    @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_PattisonJeffrey_Pattison Customer IT Monkey ✭

    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:

  • Peter_MiklianPeter_Miklian Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭

    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.

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