Customer Engagement & Dynamics CRM Forum

We auto-create cases from incoming emails. We recently ran into an issue where some emails weren't being created, which turned out to be due to the email body being too long. We set the Case Description field to the email message body. The Case Description field character limit is set to 20,000.

How have others dealt with this issue? Sure, I could simply increase the limit but there's no need to have that many characters in the description field when the full email can be viewed in the case timeline. The simplest approach seems to be just truncate the email body before setting the case description but I'm not finding a way to accomplish that.

Any advice is appreciated!

#CustomerEngagement #Admin​​

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Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
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Is this using OOTB auto case creation (auto record creation)? If I recall, this doesn't populate the case description, just the title (with the subject of the email). That may have changed since I worked with it however.

We populated the case description with the email body too, but it relied on some script which ran when the case form opened. To that end, we simply truncated the text string that was written to the length of the field, within the script itself.

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Tom Pickles
Business Systems Developer
Visit Scotland
Edinburgh
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Original Message:
Sent: Nov 01, 2019 11:58 AM
From: Marcus Cadena
Subject: Convert Email to Case - Email Body Exceeds Length of Case Description Character Limit

We auto-create cases from incoming emails. We recently ran into an issue where some emails weren't being created, which turned out to be due to the email body being too long. We set the Case Description field to the email message body. The Case Description field character limit is set to 20,000.

How have others dealt with this issue? Sure, I could simply increase the limit but there's no need to have that many characters in the description field when the full email can be viewed in the case timeline. The simplest approach seems to be just truncate the email body before setting the case description but I'm not finding a way to accomplish that.

Any advice is appreciated!

#CustomerEngagement #Admin​​

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
------------------------------

We're newer to Dynamics so I'm not sure what it was like before. Now, there's the ability to set a majority of the case fields when creating the case.

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Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Nov 04, 2019 04:04 AM
From: Tom Pickles
Subject: Convert Email to Case - Email Body Exceeds Length of Case Description Character Limit

Is this using OOTB auto case creation (auto record creation)? If I recall, this doesn't populate the case description, just the title (with the subject of the email). That may have changed since I worked with it however.

We populated the case description with the email body too, but it relied on some script which ran when the case form opened. To that end, we simply truncated the text string that was written to the length of the field, within the script itself.

------------------------------
Tom Pickles
Business Systems Developer
Visit Scotland
Edinburgh

Original Message:
Sent: Nov 01, 2019 11:58 AM
From: Marcus Cadena
Subject: Convert Email to Case - Email Body Exceeds Length of Case Description Character Limit

We auto-create cases from incoming emails. We recently ran into an issue where some emails weren't being created, which turned out to be due to the email body being too long. We set the Case Description field to the email message body. The Case Description field character limit is set to 20,000.

How have others dealt with this issue? Sure, I could simply increase the limit but there's no need to have that many characters in the description field when the full email can be viewed in the case timeline. The simplest approach seems to be just truncate the email body before setting the case description but I'm not finding a way to accomplish that.

Any advice is appreciated!

#CustomerEngagement #Admin​​

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
------------------------------

Could you have the case creation rule set the Description to something like "See original email for initial description" by default on every case?  Then after the rep has reviewed the email they can update the Description field with a summary.

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Ben Edgren
CRM Applications Manager
Hufcor, Inc
Janesville WI
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Nov 01, 2019 11:58 AM
From: Marcus Cadena
Subject: Convert Email to Case - Email Body Exceeds Length of Case Description Character Limit

We auto-create cases from incoming emails. We recently ran into an issue where some emails weren't being created, which turned out to be due to the email body being too long. We set the Case Description field to the email message body. The Case Description field character limit is set to 20,000.

How have others dealt with this issue? Sure, I could simply increase the limit but there's no need to have that many characters in the description field when the full email can be viewed in the case timeline. The simplest approach seems to be just truncate the email body before setting the case description but I'm not finding a way to accomplish that.

Any advice is appreciated!

#CustomerEngagement #Admin​​

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
------------------------------

Hi Marcus,

we had the exact same issue when we setup email to case rules. 

What we did is the following:
1) Create the case with a placeholder text like: "this description will be overwritten with the email content"
2) create a Microsoft Flow (ahem, Power Automate I should say...) that runs on Case Create to parse the HTML content of the email to a string using the "HTML to String" component
3) we have a field length of 500 char setup, so I built in a condition to say: If length of email is less than 500 char, transfer full string to description field, else: truncate string to 500 char (using sub-string) and then place it in the description field (assuming that the first 500 char of an email is enough to understand the context of the case.

attached a screenshot of what we did.

This prevents case creation to fail on a too long email, and will make sure that the description field is not too long (20,000 char is way to much if you ask me).

The Flow will run almost instantly, so almost as soon as the user opens the created case, the email body will be there already.

Hope this helps!

------------------------------
Rogier Vriezen
Functional Consultant
Amsterdam, Netherlands
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Nov 01, 2019 11:58 AM
From: Marcus Cadena
Subject: Convert Email to Case - Email Body Exceeds Length of Case Description Character Limit

We auto-create cases from incoming emails. We recently ran into an issue where some emails weren't being created, which turned out to be due to the email body being too long. We set the Case Description field to the email message body. The Case Description field character limit is set to 20,000.

How have others dealt with this issue? Sure, I could simply increase the limit but there's no need to have that many characters in the description field when the full email can be viewed in the case timeline. The simplest approach seems to be just truncate the email body before setting the case description but I'm not finding a way to accomplish that.

Any advice is appreciated!

#CustomerEngagement #Admin​​

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
------------------------------

@Ben Edgren I like this approach due to its simplicity. This will likely be our short term approach as it will be very easy to implement.

@Rogier Vriezen I had been thinking Flo...Power Automate (this will take some to adjust to) would make this a lot easier to do an if/then scenario based on string length. We have several other workflows that run before a user picks up a case that I'd like to consolidate into Automations, so I think you're solution is where we'll end up at.

And I 100% agree that 20,000 characters is way too long. We had a partner do the initial configuration so I didn't realize that's what it was set at until this issue came up.

Thank you both for your input, it helped greatly.

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Nov 01, 2019 11:58 AM
From: Marcus Cadena
Subject: Convert Email to Case - Email Body Exceeds Length of Case Description Character Limit

We auto-create cases from incoming emails. We recently ran into an issue where some emails weren't being created, which turned out to be due to the email body being too long. We set the Case Description field to the email message body. The Case Description field character limit is set to 20,000.

How have others dealt with this issue? Sure, I could simply increase the limit but there's no need to have that many characters in the description field when the full email can be viewed in the case timeline. The simplest approach seems to be just truncate the email body before setting the case description but I'm not finding a way to accomplish that.

Any advice is appreciated!

#CustomerEngagement #Admin​​

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
------------------------------

You can always shorten the field length if you desire. Emails that are too long will be cut off automatically. If you're concerned of losing valuable information on older records, you can do something like exporting all cases you have now to Excel and check the length with '=len(A1)', filter for any descriptions that are longer than your newly selected field length and manually decide what to do with those that go over that length.

Most emails we see at clients are short and to the point. When someone feels the need to write a book in an email, no-one will take the time to read it anyway ;-)

Good luck with whatever way you decide to go!

------------------------------
Rogier Vriezen
Functional Consultant
Amsterdam, Netherlands
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Nov 05, 2019 07:21 AM
From: Marcus Cadena
Subject: Convert Email to Case - Email Body Exceeds Length of Case Description Character Limit

@Ben Edgren I like this approach due to its simplicity. This will likely be our short term approach as it will be very easy to implement.

@Rogier Vriezen I had been thinking Flo...Power Automate (this will take some to adjust to) would make this a lot easier to do an if/then scenario based on string length. We have several other workflows that run before a user picks up a case that I'd like to consolidate into Automations, so I think you're solution is where we'll end up at.

And I 100% agree that 20,000 characters is way too long. We had a partner do the initial configuration so I didn't realize that's what it was set at until this issue came up.

Thank you both for your input, it helped greatly.

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota

Original Message:
Sent: Nov 01, 2019 11:58 AM
From: Marcus Cadena
Subject: Convert Email to Case - Email Body Exceeds Length of Case Description Character Limit

We auto-create cases from incoming emails. We recently ran into an issue where some emails weren't being created, which turned out to be due to the email body being too long. We set the Case Description field to the email message body. The Case Description field character limit is set to 20,000.

How have others dealt with this issue? Sure, I could simply increase the limit but there's no need to have that many characters in the description field when the full email can be viewed in the case timeline. The simplest approach seems to be just truncate the email body before setting the case description but I'm not finding a way to accomplish that.

Any advice is appreciated!

#CustomerEngagement #Admin​​

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
------------------------------

To close the loop on this, we ended up taking @Ben Edgren's suggestion except we aren't putting placeholder text. Taking a step back to think about what the intent of the description field is really helped.​ For us, it's not a data dump of the incoming email but rather a brief summary of the case beyond what the case title conveys.

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Nov 01, 2019 11:58 AM
From: Marcus Cadena
Subject: Convert Email to Case - Email Body Exceeds Length of Case Description Character Limit

We auto-create cases from incoming emails. We recently ran into an issue where some emails weren't being created, which turned out to be due to the email body being too long. We set the Case Description field to the email message body. The Case Description field character limit is set to 20,000.

How have others dealt with this issue? Sure, I could simply increase the limit but there's no need to have that many characters in the description field when the full email can be viewed in the case timeline. The simplest approach seems to be just truncate the email body before setting the case description but I'm not finding a way to accomplish that.

Any advice is appreciated!

#CustomerEngagement #Admin​​

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
------------------------------

Great move to go back to the drawing table to re-think what that description field means to you, @Marcus Cadena! "We" should do that more often. The solution you choose may require an extra step from the users, but it will definitely make that field more meaningful to everyone, and that's what counts!​​

------------------------------
Rogier Vriezen
Functional Consultant
Amsterdam, Netherlands
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Nov 12, 2019 09:47 AM
From: Marcus Cadena
Subject: Convert Email to Case - Email Body Exceeds Length of Case Description Character Limit

To close the loop on this, we ended up taking @Ben Edgren's suggestion except we aren't putting placeholder text. Taking a step back to think about what the intent of the description field is really helped.​ For us, it's not a data dump of the incoming email but rather a brief summary of the case beyond what the case title conveys.

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota

Original Message:
Sent: Nov 01, 2019 11:58 AM
From: Marcus Cadena
Subject: Convert Email to Case - Email Body Exceeds Length of Case Description Character Limit

We auto-create cases from incoming emails. We recently ran into an issue where some emails weren't being created, which turned out to be due to the email body being too long. We set the Case Description field to the email message body. The Case Description field character limit is set to 20,000.

How have others dealt with this issue? Sure, I could simply increase the limit but there's no need to have that many characters in the description field when the full email can be viewed in the case timeline. The simplest approach seems to be just truncate the email body before setting the case description but I'm not finding a way to accomplish that.

Any advice is appreciated!

#CustomerEngagement #Admin​​

------------------------------
Marcus Cadena
Crow Wing County
Brainerd, Minnesota
------------------------------