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How Can I Directly Enter Line Breaks into an RRC Attribute?


Nate Decker (37814161) | asked Sep 13 '13, 5:55 p.m.

I've imported data into RRC where the attributes for the data included text with line breaks. The attributes appeared as a single line of text in RRC, but when I export the data back out, the line breaks are still present. This is good. However, if I edit those attributes, the line breaks are destroyed; when the data is subsequently exported out of RRC, it appears as a single line of text.

How can I directly enter text into an RRC artifact attribute (string) and insert a carriage return/line feed/line break/new line character?

I've tried pasting text from Notepad and Word, but to no effect. Obviously it's possible for these attributes to include line breaks since they were imported that way, but I need to have the ability to directly insert them via data entry.

4 answers



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Antoinette Iacobo (650712) | answered Sep 16 '13, 11:42 a.m.
 Nate,

This sounds like the built-in rich text (CKEditor) is removing them when you edit them.  I'm unable to maintain them either. 

I found this RFE related to this question and I don't think it's possible solely within RRC:   https://jazz.net/jazz03/web/projects/Requirements%20Management#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=71906

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Brian Fleming (1.6k11928) | answered Sep 16 '13, 2:01 p.m.
Today, attributes do not support line breaks.  This RFE may be a closer match to the capability you need: https://jazz.net/jazz03/web/projects/Requirements%20Management#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=58073

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Antoinette Iacobo (650712) | answered Sep 16 '13, 2:48 p.m.
Brian, yes. I didn't catch the attributes part in the description.  I was thinking of the test body.  That RFE matches this question better.

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Nate Decker (37814161) | answered Sep 16 '13, 4:40 p.m.

The problem with that enhancement request is that they are talking about supporting full rich text formatting. The comments indicate that this poses technical problems. I'm assuming that using a rich text data structure for the attributes has storage consequences when your talking about thousands of artifacts in a given module.

Supporting full rich text is above and beyond what I am asking for. In fact, RRC already supports carriage returns and line breaks within attributes. This is evidenced by the fact that I can import a CSV that has carriage returns and then later export the data back out again and have the carriage returns preserved. So at least where line breaks are concerned, RRC is fully capable of supporting it. The problem is when you make edits via the web client.

I would think it would be much easier to add support just for carriage returns but continue to leave rich text formatting unsupported.

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