Change Request Summary Report Description

[mwaite]

When I run the Change Summary Report the Description field is empty. We reverted our change objects back from Rich Text fields to basic text fields when the Rich Text was pushed out in Windchill 11.

I found a post with the same problem here:
https://community.ptc.com/t5/Windchill/Change-Request-Summary-report-Description/m-p/810977

In the old post, the reports were pulling the plain text fields, and the user was using the Rich Text.

Now it seems like PTC has changed the reports to pull the Rich Text instead of the plain text. We don't want to use the Rich Text fields.  They don't add any value, and they can't be read with common report tools like SSRS.

Has anyone found a way to have the new reports pull the original fields?

Has anyone found a way to have SSRS read the blob? (We've looked at it and it isn't stored as RTF.  PTC does something to it before they store it.  Maybe compress it?  I read in WCH that the RTF fields are left out of tables because of the performance impact.

[avillanueva]

If its JSP, you will likely have to customize and mod the report. I converted to rich text and since I had a custom JSP page I had to call out the attribute for the rich text description:

<jca:renderPropertyPanel model="${ecnInfoModel}">
<jca:addProperty property="longDescription.formattedText"/>
</jca:renderPropertyPanel>

I believe the normal description name is just "description". Trying finding that in the report generation and modify the call out. Just know you will fight this battle in the future as they push out more rich text fields. 

This is from the attributes list for that object.

[Marco_Tosin]

I have a couple of reports that also extract the rich text description but the problem is that the string does not wrap and so it is very long to see in the results.

In the query builder I use only the highlighted attribute

[mwaite]

I wish we could use query builder for all our reports, but query builder does not support recursion.  We use SSRS because we can build the recursion in the sql query.  

[mwaite]

I hope PTC doesn't push out any more Rich Text attributes until they fix the problems described in Article - CS298196. 

I don't find much value in the Rich Text attributes over the plain text.

[mwaite]

Just to clarify my problem:  When PTC first pushed out the Rich Text attributes in WC 11, we immediately followed https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS299365 to revert back to plain text attributes.  We never used Rich Text.  We don't have a use case for Rich Text.  

Some of the reports PTC delivers read the Rich Text.  When we run the reports, the fields are blank because our Rich Text fields are empty.

This article describes a few things that are "working as designed" that customers reported as problems.

https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/cs298196

[mwaite · Accepted solution]

PTC told me how to change the JasperReports to use the plain text description and proposed solution.  I asked PTC to make them available to customers through an article linked to CS299365.