Does the changelog smart value work for multi-line fields?

Kimmee Busby

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to set up an automation rule that sends a web request when an issue is updated. I’m using the {{changelog}} smart value to capture what changes occurred. This is the simplified JSON body I’m sending in the web request:

{
"change_summary": "{{changelog}}"
}

When I change the description to a single-line value, the request works fine and the changelog includes the expected output (see first image).

When I update the description to include multi-line text (another line of text underneath the first line), I receive a 422 error. Nothing in the changelog smart value seems to render, and the request fails due to invalid JSON (second image).

I have tried using .jsonEncode and .urlEncode but that results in an empty string. 

If anyone has encountered this or knows a workaround to reliably capture and send multi-line field changes through the web request action, I’d really appreciate the help.

Thanks in advance!

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Kimmee Busby -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I am curious: why send the entire {{changelog}} that way rather than using the {{fromString}} and {{toString}} attributes for {{changelog.description}}?

Regardless of the "why"...

A quick test I did shows the {{toString}} ( and possibly the {{fromString}} ) contain newlines in the changelog for the case you describe.  And because you are trying to send the entire {{changelog}} without any parsing, it likely cannot use those encoding functions as you expect because it does not iterate over the attributes to apply the encoding.

Some possible workarounds are:

• parsing out the fromString and toString to encode them separately,
• replace the newlines with known characters, or
• first store the entire {{changelog}} as a Created Variable (which flattens it to text), perhaps named varChangelog, and then encode that as {{varChangelog.jsonEncode}}

 

Kind regards,
Bill