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I’ve got a Zap that automatically leaves a comment on a Zendesk ticket when a custom field on a Jira issue gets updated. 

 

The field in Jira supports WYSIWYG and looks like this:

The comment on Zendesk however comes through as this:

 

I’ve played around with the Formatter by Zapier but I can’t figure out how to get the text to come through properly formatted. 

 

Hi @Sandra 

First Comment/Description isn't being formatted correctly

We don't currently support HTML for this field, but it is a feature request.
Unfortunately, right now, there is no way to format the comment with bold, italics, etc.
You can add line breaks by hitting enter to put them on different lines, but multiple line breaks will be reduced to a single line break.


@Troy Tessalone Line breaks don’t seem to be coming through either. I’d be okay if line breaks worked correctly. 

Jira:

Zendesk:

 


@Sandra 

Are you able to post screenshots with how your Zap step is configured?


@Troy Tessalone sure.

Note that the zap uses test data from a different ticket, it says UAT, Password etc. 

 

 

The custom field has these options and I’ve tested them all and none formatted things correctly.

 


@Sandra 

These are arrays of items that are comma separated.

 

You’d likely need to use additional Zap action steps to properly parse and format the values into the format you want with line breaks.


@Troy Tessalone I’ve used Formatter by Zapier before but none of the translations worked. Do you know what Zap to use? 


@Sandra 

Often custom parsing/formatting requires the use of a Code step: https://zapier.com/apps/code/help


@Troy Tessalone 

Yeah I can’t get this to work properly. It keeps complaining that the query string is empty for the zap, even without worrying about the formatting. Works fine when I test the Zap, doesn’t work in production.

And the documentation for the Code step is unclear and I’m not a developer who understands javascript and how to translate an array. 

So far, Zapier hasn’t been a great experience for something that advertises as needing no coding skills. 


@Sandra

Some apps are definitely easier to use in Zaps than others.

Every app is different in terms of the logic, how data is formatted when returned, how data needs to be formatted when received.

Most apps on Zapier are built and maintained by the app developers themselves.

Zapier serves as a bridge between apps, but is limited to the capabilities of the each app.
 

Some other options you can explore for help…

Open a ticket with Zapier Support: https://zapier.com/app/get-help

Look to hire a Zapier Expert: https://zapier.com/experts


Hey @Sandra!

Hmm, I’m thinking that you could potentially using a Formatter (Utilities > Line-item to Text) action to convert the line items into a single block of text with each line item split out onto a newline.

For that you’d need to select the relevant field from Jira in the Input field and then use o:newline:] as the separator. It should look similar to this:

bfe63b144c7c1ce6d627545ad288ed34.png
Then the line items should be converted to text that’s split across different lines like this:
d80a5253c2f0098390454a1ee354eb80.png

Can you give that a try and let us know whether that does the trick?