Multiline Variables in Manual Intervention Instructions

[IgluDaveMcDermid (Dave McDermid)]

Hi,

We’re experiencing an issue very similar to this one:

Displaying a multi-line string or powershell array from an xml file in the manual intervention step

We are trying to make it easy for a reviewer to approve/deny a paused deployment that is waiting for intervention. Is there a way to pass a multi-line variable or array from the previous step in the approval description? I can only get the first line of the XML doc to display in the manual intervention prompt. Previous step sets the variable from an XML document. [string]$ReportInfo = Format-ReportXml -Path $DeployOutputPath Set-OctopusVariable "OctopusReportInfo" -Value "$ReportInfo" The ‘i…

I can recreate the issue with a simple output variable assigned to a 2 line string such as:

$result = @'
line 1
line 2
'@

Write-Output $result

Set-OctopusVariable -name "Result" -value "$result"

this displays in the instructions as:

line 1 line 2

The Task Log shows the same variable output correctly on 2 lines from the powershell script.

We’re using version 2018.5.7.

[henrik (Henrik Andersson)]

Hi Dave,

The manual intervention instructions use markdown syntax and to insert a new line, you need to add a blank line between each line. I.e.

$result = @"
line1

line2
"@

I hope that helps.

Thank you and kind regards,
Henrik

[IgluDaveMcDermid (Dave McDermid)]

Hi,

I’m familiar with Markdown, however typically MarkDown renders single line breaks as a new line, and double as a new paragraph. This would be really useful to support. I’m not actually in control of the formatting of the content as it is the output from a process run by a PowerShell script.

For now I’m wrapping the variable with 3 backticks so it gets formatted as code and this works well.

Thanks for your help,
Dave

[henrik (Henrik Andersson)]

Hi Dave,

Good to hear that you’ve got a workaround for the issue, I’ll investigate why we’re not properly rendering single new lines.

Cheers,
Henrik

[IgluDaveMcDermid (Dave McDermid)]

Thanks Henrik.

I’ve just done a bit more reading - I think there is some variance between different MarkDown parsers, some requiring a double space at the end of the preceding line in order to treat as a line break. Unfortunately the MarkDown Documentation linked to from the Octopus UI doesn’t cover this.

Dave