The activity stream flyout window shows only the first seven lines of a comment or work note, but does not indicate the entry is truncated unless there are more than 200 characters

There are two links that may be displayed under a truncated activity stream entry in lists:
- "See all text": Displays if the text is either more than 512,000 characters long or greater 10MB.
- "Show More": Displays if there are more than 200 characters. For some reason, this often appears when there are actually no more characters to display. The system seems to cut the actual limit at 7 lines, which may contain more characters than 200.
Both links may show for the same entry.

If there is an activity stream entry with more than 7 lines of text, but fewer than 200 characters, such as a comment with several line breaks, the text is truncated but neither link appears. The only way to see the full text is by looking at the form view. Users who post to the activity stream from the list might think part of their comment was lost if this happened.

 

1. Navigate to any record with an activity stream. such as a Incident and open it.
2. Remove 'Activities (filtered)' field from ALL sections of Incident form for the current view (this will enable the Activity Stream flyout window for the current view).
3. Return to Incident form and click the Activity Stream icon on the header bar to bring up Activity Stream flyout window.
4. In the Activity Stream flyout window, paste some text that takes up more than 7 lines in the Comments or Work Note box, but that contains fewer than 200 characters. For example:
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten

5. Click "Post".
6. Note that text is truncated in the stream but that neither the "See all text" nor "Show More" link appear in the entry .

Expected: All 10 lines of text are displayed in the Activity Stream
Actual: Only 7 lines are displayed in the Activity Stream

Note: The data is saved correctly though. If you add the Activity Formatter to the Incident form you will see all 10 lines. This seems to be a matter of display issue with the Activity Stream.
Note: This is also reproducible from any List View containing the Activity Stream flyout window presenting a journal entry field for input.

After carefully considering the severity and frequency of the issue, and risk of attempting a fix, it has been decided to not address this issue in any current or future releases. We do not make this decision lightly, and we apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any questions regarding this problem, contact ServiceNow Customer Support.