Approval Notification Displays HTML Tags in Description Field - Support and Troubleshooting

Approval Notification Displays HTML Tags in Description Field Issue The approval notification is displaying HTML tags in the description field instead of plain text.

The notifications are out-of-the-box, and no changes have been made to the email template.

Steps to reproduce the issue: 1. View the approval notification email 2. Observe the description field containing HTML tags instead of plain text

Facts Customers often get confused or overlook both these fields because of their display name -

Description (description)

Description (rich_description)

Release All

Cause - By default, ServiceNow adds the 'sysapproval.description' field to the email template - However, if in HR cases, there is an additional field called 'rich_description' which has plain text while description has HTML tagged text, this issue occurs.

Resolution Two solutions:

1. Ensure that the description field receives plain text instead of HTML tags. 2. Or, change the email template to pull data from the 'rich_description' field instead of the 'description' field by updating the template to use '${sysapproval.rich_description}' instead of '${sysapproval.description}'.