Formatting Note Lines with GP Web Services

When importing customer notes into GP 10 via Web Services, a client discovered that typical 'new line' escape sequences were not working properly for Notes. It turns out that Web Services handles formatting differently than eConnect, at least when it comes to new lines in Notes.

With GP 10 Web Services, \r\n, \r, and \n (or vbCr, vbLf, or vbCrLf in Visual Basic) all produce the same results in notes:

Note the vertical bar at the beginning of line 2 and 3. This is a line feed character, which GP Notes do not like.

In eConnect, you can use \r or vbCr to produce a new line, but in Web Services, any of the new line characters are being transformed into a CR and LF.

The solution to this is to use the UTF-8 representation of CR: & #13 ;

.Notes = "Note line #1 & #13 ; Line #2 & #13 ; This is line #3"

(In the above examples, I have added spaces between the characters so that they aren't parsed out of the blog post as HTML. When you use them, you will remove the spaces between the ampersand, pound sign, and before the semi-colon.)

With this change, the notes are imported with proper line breaks, but without the extra vertical bar characters.

And there you go!