Preserving line breaks on external report templates from LongText fields

[matty2112]

I consulted related threads and spent significant time on this, but am still stuck. I have a table named Reports with a field ExtraNotes (type LongText). Users of my app can edit this field and the text they enter will include line breaks. I have a Google Docs report template that uses this field, with the template assigned to both Body and Attachment (PDF) in a workflow action. When I simply embed the field like this in the template…

<<[ExtraNotes]>>

…the PDF contains the line breaks as desired, but the email body does not and the text just appears as a continuous line/paragraph. (Tested in Hotmail client, O365 web client, and Outlook client.)

As a workaround, I added a virtual column ExtraNotesList (type List) that gets its value via SPLIT on the original field. In the report template, I then use 100+ lines like…

<<If:COUNT([ExtraNotesList]) >= 1>>│ <<INDEX([ExtraNotesList], 1)>><>
<<If:COUNT([ExtraNotesList]) >= 2>>│ <<INDEX([ExtraNotesList], 2)>><>
…
<<If:COUNT([ExtraNotesList]) >= 150>>│ <<INDEX([ExtraNotesList], 150)>><>

This workaround works … but it’s ugly, I have to extend it periodically when users complain their text is cutting off, and there’s human error in those updates to copy/paste new lines and adjust line numbers.

Is there a better way?

Thank you.

Here are the related threads I consulted:

Substituting line breaks in email template Questions

In the app, if I was wanting to display a list of items, each item on it’s own line, I would do the little trick of: substitue([list] , " , " , " ") Basically, substituting a line break, for every comma. This does not seem to work in an workflow email template. Does anyone know how I can do this? Additional related question: How can I insert HTML code into a workflow template? Trying to use angle brackets, <>, results in them being displayed, via HTML code of “&lt” and “&gt”. I’m thinking t…

(LongText) Line Breaks not Carrying over to Report Questions

Good Afternoon Everyone, I have a report in which the user can set some custom text, greetings, signitures etc, What seems to be happening is the line breaks that the user has entered in are not being carried over to the report. The output is in 1 long string.

User Email Settings in the App. Column Type (Long Text)

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[matty2112]

Bumping this in hopes of a breakthrough from someone.