SAP Knowledge Base Article - Public

3383723 - Special characters in Ad Hoc report for URL in Agency Comment

Symptom

After updating a URL in the Agency comment, when you run an Ad Hoc report, there are special characters in the URL e.g. there are HTML tags or "&" symbol is replaced with "&".

Image/data in this KBA is from SAP internal systems, sample data, or demo systems. Any resemblance to real data is purely coincidental

Environment

SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Management

Reproducing the Issue

  1. Recruiting>Job Requisitions
  2. Click on a Job Requisition
  3. Job Postings>Agency Comment>Add Comment
  4. Enter a URL in the comments e.g. https://www.google.com
  5. Click Save Changes
  6. Run an Ad Hoc report for Agency comment from Postings table and notice that there are special characters/html tags in the report:

Cause

This is expected behaviour. The agency comments is received in UI in a rich-text field, hence it is escaped before storing in the database.

Resolution

As the agency comment is not an ordinary text box, SF cannot un-escape and store this in the database as it might introduce a security threat. The ad hoc report reads the agency comments directly from the DB and hence it appears in the escaped form. Rich text appearing as HTML tag special character is a known issue.

Keywords

adhoc, comments, agencies , KBA , LOD-SF-RCM-REP , Reporting & Analytics, Data Imports & Exports , Known Error

Product

SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting all versions