Visualforce - Rich text substitute style= "" with style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;"

Question

I have three different issues. To start with, we have a custom solution to generate contract/offer documents (PDF) through Visualforce. The terms and conditions are saved in a rich text field of custom object and its value is printed in Visualforce. The issues are the following:

1. Copy paste rich text value from sandbox to production does not work properly. I believe this is an API Version issue cause i am copying from sandbox to production where versions are different. And copy-paste does not work properly. When i do this between sandboxes, value of rich text remains the same. I have opened a case to Salesforce support for confirmation.
2. As a workaround, i tried to do use SUBSTITUTE function to replace the necessary values. One of the values i need to replace is the following:

<apex:outputText rendered="{!IF(clause.csclm__Sequence__c < 12, true, false)}" escape="false" value="{!SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(clause.csclm__Final_Rich_Text__c, 'Arial', 'Arial Unicode MS'), 'style=&quot;&quot;' , 'style=&quot;margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;&quot;')}"></apex:outputText>

but does not seem to work. Should i use differently the double quote symbol? Because this is why the replacement does not work

3. As far as i have seen, i can do SUBSTITUTE up to 3 (three) levels. I cannot use (SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE)))). I can only use up to: SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE))). If i want to do multiple SUBSTITUTIONS, what is the recommended way to achieve it?

Answer 1

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Copy paste rich text value from sandbox to production does not work properly. I believe this is an API Version issue cause i am copying from sandbox to production where versions are different. And copy-paste does not work properly. When i do this between sandboxes, value of rich text remains the same. I have opened a case to Salesforce support for confirmation.

Without seeing more information, we can't answer this part. It could be a copy-paste problem elsewhere, such as if you try to copy-paste to Microsoft Word or not, or between different browsers. In the general sense, it should work correctly, the environment shouldn't matter.

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As a workaround, i tried to do use SUBSTITUTE function to replace the necessary values. One of the values i need to replace is the following:

Two things here.

First, the < operator already returns a Boolean value, so you don't need the IF statement:

rendered="{!clause.csclm__Sequence__c < 12}" 

Second, once you're inside an expression, you don't need to escape quotes, and in fact, you should not escape quotes; it'll break the HTML in fun and exciting ways. It'll highlight weird in your code editor, but it does compile and run.

value="{!
    SUBSTITUTE(
        SUBSTITUTE(
            clause.csclm__Final_Rich_Text__c, 
            'Arial', 
            'Arial Unicode MS'
        ), 
        'style=""', 
        'style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;"'
    )
}"

Notice how we can also use line breaks to make our code read cleaner.

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As far as i have seen, i can do SUBSTITUTE up to 3 (three) levels. I cannot use (SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE)))). I can only use up to: SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE))). If i want to do multiple SUBSTITUTIONS, what is the recommended way to achieve it?

I don't know if there's an actual limit, but it's surely more than 3. I can trivially prove this with:

    <apex:outputText 
        value="{!
SUBSTITUTE(
    SUBSTITUTE(
        SUBSTITUTE(
            SUBSTITUTE(
                "a b c d", 
                "a", 
                "Hello"
            ), 
            "b", 
            "Brave"
        ),
        "c",
        "New"
    ),
    "d",
    "World"
)
        }" />

Which outputs:

Hello Brave New World

Make sure you're providing three parameters to each copy of SUBSTITUTE, and make sure you're closing the parentheses and adding commas appropriately.

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Whatever's going on, it sounds more like a difference in the Rich Text Editor that you're using than anything else. This might or might not be Salesforce-specific, we just don't know from the details provided here. That said, moving records between organizations might be easier with an actual ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) tool, such as the Data Loader. This avoids any ambiguity that may arise from copy-pasting, since it uses a standard API to load/save the data, or using a plain text field in a Visualforce page to copy-paste the raw HTML without interpretation.

Answer 2

Finally, after Production was moved to winter'23 version, issue was resolved. My assumption regarding the API Version seems that was correct.