Dealing with Microsoft Word illegal characters

David Lucey · ‎11-17-2011

Users can paste content into form fields from Microsoft Word or Outlook, including characters like Smart Quotes and em dashes that cause problems in some external systems.

I'd like to hear how other customers are dealing with users pasting content into form fields that prevent messages from being sent into some external systems like CA Service Desk.

Examples of characters:

- ' " " ®

NCC helped with one way to handle this, translating in the Outbound Transformation, however, this way has a limitation in that you have to explicitly call out each character and one could easily be missed.

I'm thinking there must be a more elegant way to handle this, perhaps ISF that fires on submit and enforces encoding on the form?

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Dave

Ant Erickson · ‎11-17-2011

Hi David,

Interesting pick-up, we actually had this be a huge problem for our service definitions. We found when a customer pasted information in to a requisition with a multiple-task workflow, it would actually corrupt the service form.

I believe it's sorted now in Version 9; but it used to throw the WDDX content of the form in to disarray and stop it from rendering. We had to cancel delivery plan in the Monitor Plan task to close the Requistion out.

We haven't had it be a problem in to our ticketing integrations yet but have had an issue with some of our other web service calls; we ended up having to get the remote system to translate them at the destination end, not on the outbound end. I will keep my eye out and see if there are some that have slipped under the radar!

Thanks,

Ant