API Issue: Creating Issues with Multi-line Descriptions via REST API

[Nick]

Hi Jira Community,

I'm integrating Adobe Workfront with Jira Cloud using the REST API v3 (/rest/api/3/issue) and running into an issue when creating Spaces and Tasks with descriptions (Description field) that contain line breaks/newlines.

What works:

• Single-line descriptions create successfully

What fails:

• Descriptions with hard returns/newlines cause a 400 error: "There was an error parsing JSON"

Current approach: I'm using the Atlassian Document Format (ADF) structure:

json

"description": {  "type": "doc",  "version": 1,  "content": [    {      "type": "paragraph",      "content": [        {          "type": "text",          "text": "{{description}}"        }      ]    }  ]}

The problem: When {{description}} contains text with line breaks (e.g., from a multi-paragraph field in Workfront), the JSON fails to parse.

What I've tried:

• Replacing newlines with spaces
• Escaping special characters
• Using stripHTML() functions

Questions:

1. How should multi-line text be formatted in the ADF structure?
2. Should I split paragraphs into separate ADF paragraph objects?
3. Is there a recommended way to sanitize external text data before passing to the Jira API?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
Nick
PS - I'm not a developer, but have been learning.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Nick 

Yes, and...to the suggestions from @Andy Rusnak 

Did you ensure the message was encoded so the line breaks / newlines send correctly?  I am not familiar with Adobe Workfront, but perhaps there is a function to do that encoding.

If the endpoint is called from an Atlassian Automation rule, that would be the jsonEncode function.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Andy Rusnak]

Hi Nick, 

I hope this post finds you well!  I hope your journey into development work has been enjoyable thus far too!  

I ran a quick test with the description field containing new line characters and didn't have any issues related to this.  This was a sample of what I used for the field: 

"description": { 
    "type": "doc", 
    "version": 1, 
    "content": [
        {
            "type": "paragraph",
            "content": [
                {
                   "type": "text", 
                   "text": "Hello there\nfrom a new line"
                }
            ]
         }
    ]
}

Is that similar to how yours is formatted?  Would you be willing to share an actual sample of the request that fails?    

The JSON parser is also pretty strict, so if you have a comma for example after the last line it will also throw an error like that.  

Best, 

Andy