There can be some unexpected outcomes when Notes are included in messages.
| Issue | Detail | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notes don't append as expected |
This can occur when the message format has defined multiple notes codes in a single cell. e.g.,
The note detail displays, but the format and structure of the cell content is not what was expected and has additional padding and line spacing in it. See Formatted v Unformatted Notes and Notes Processing in Messaging |
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| Notes don't align with other cells |
The message format could contain a row that has two cells in it - the first is a heading and the second a note code.
Again, it additional spacing around the content. See Notes Processing in Messaging |
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| The Note Font is not what was expected | This is a bit of a contentious issue but the content of the note will attempt to retain the font definition of the note itself and not convert to the font of the message definition. The issue usually arises from notes entered in previous Tourplan versions that are in a font that does not translate to an equivalent font that is available/supported in NX | |||||||
Formatted v Unformatted Notes
NX supports 2 types of notes - Formatted and Unformatted (text based). Formatted notes entered directly in NX will be stored in HTML format and notes entered in previous Tourplan versions will be in RTF format until they are edited in NX at which point they will be converted to HTML format. The format that the note is to be treated as, is defined against the note category and when the note is read by the webservices it is converted to the correct format based on the setting of the note category, regardless of how it has been stored in the database.
Formatted notes are returned as a complete set of valid HTML including all paragraph and font formatting whist text based notes have any font and formatting data stripped from them and are returned in plain text.
In the majority of the examples seen, the content of the note in question is relatively short, often single line, and not requiring all of the formatting and related function of a traditional note. They are more like the user defined text fields available at a booking header level or the voucher text fields that are on the service lines.
Notes Processing in Messaging
In Tourplan NX (as of version 1.1) Notes are being retrieved as plain text and are not going through the same logic as formatted notes when being inserted into the Word document that is the generated message. This means a couple of things:
1) They will not get paragraph markers before or after them
2) They will not contain any font or styling information and so will inherit the font/style of the substitution code itself
As a result message definitions that have layouts such as:
| Details: | <NTS:AB> - <NTS:CD> | will now substitute as | Details: | Notes Text (AB) - Notes Text (CD) |
| Details: | <NTS:AB> - <NTS:XX> | will now substitute as | Details: | Note content is aligned correctly |
Formatted Notes
In NX, notes with tables defined in them retain the table layout when inserted into the table cell of the <nts:xx> code. Formatted notes processing uses a different technique to process the note so that it can retain any formatting that the note has. To do this new table cells are generated in the table that can then host the content of the NTS record. Doing this forces the new cell to inherit default settings from Word. In many instances this includes padding around the content. NX has no control over this, and for multi-line formatted notes the outcome is usually acceptable.
For shorter notes it typically isn't and makes the alignment appear incorrect. In these cases the note template itself should be changed to unformatted.