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So I know that Rich/Long text fields will automatically get truncated when running a report in the UI or when trying to schedule a report. I get this and think this is something that should be in place as the report would be rather useless if it were trying to display 20k character fields in a report.

I have a situation where we have 'Hot Accounts'. These are flagged account that are high priority. We have a hot account details field that is a long text field that contains a few paragraphs of information around the account and why its is flagged.

In the system, there is very rarely more than 10 or so Hot accounts as a time, and the hot account details field is usually between 500-1000 characters, so it's not huge by any means, but it surpasses the allowed 255 in the report.

I was really hoping to be able to leverage native functionality and schedule a report to show these hot accounts and the details around them but as I mentioned before the system cuts the details field at 255 characters.

Solution that I have come up with

I know that I could write a scheduled APEX class that will query the hot accounts, and create an email message, take the data from the query and build out an an HTML table within the email.

This would work, but it requires adjusting the code every time a new requirement is made, so the maintenance is high. I would much rather use native SF so a non coder could manage this. I know I could use custom settings thats feed my class and have the admin update those, but still not nearly as nice as a simple scheduled report.

What I am looking for

Does anyone have a better workaround they have used for this character limitation for long text areas in reports they have used? I just want to make sure I'm not reinventing the wheel if someone else has a cleaner solution.

Or is my workaround of a scheduled class where I have to manually build the email in HTML in the Email Message my best bet?

Just trying to leverage config over code here, but am worried I might have no choice.

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  • Wouldn't Conga work here? (Yes, appexchange and costs $ but you may already have this installed). Output is delivered as either word, pdf, excel to end users, including users who might not be sfdc users. Longer than 255 fields are supported. All configurable, no code. Configuration though, I'll admit, can be opaque.
    – cropredy
    Commented Dec 3, 2013 at 20:34
  • Yes Conga would work great in this scenario, and have used it in other instances, but they do not have it in this org, and investing in it is not on the short term roadmap.
    – Chris Duncombe
    Commented Dec 3, 2013 at 20:38
  • Would you be opposed to a middle ground of a Flow by building a flow plugin to actually do the email and have the rest of the email content be an email template with replace keys in it that you could do in the Plugin? You could also create "extra" inputs for new values they may want to add to the table in the email so it could be scalable for x input amount of changes to the table? This would give a non code user the ability to edit the email template and manage new inputs via your "extra" flow inputs to expand table rows and data for new possible additions in the future.
    – cricketlang
    Commented Oct 9, 2015 at 19:15

1 Answer 1

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It is not possible to use a formula on a long text field so creating 4 text formula fields that grab different sections won't work.

You could use workflow rules and 4 text fields to fill out each text field on create or edit. Report on these 4 text fields for hot accounts to pull down the complete long text field info. Kind of hack-ish but easy to create and maintain.

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  • I'm agree with this answer. If is only 10 records and no more than 1000 characters. Why not implement 4 formula fields and you will still use standard features from salesforce and no maintenance at all.
    – MANUELAN00
    Commented Feb 11, 2016 at 23:22

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