I need a String method in a Trigger to validate if a Rich Text Area is blank

Question

I need assistance in evaluating whether a Rich Text Area custom field is blank using an Apex trigger.

Rich Text Field name: Application_Workaround__c

I have tried the following within the context of a trigger:

string.isBlank(new_application_dependency_record.Application_Workaround__c) 

This method returns "true" if there is a single break within the rich text field "Application_Workaround__c". THe problem is that the
tag in the rich text field is not a valid value but the string method considers it to be a non-blank.

I also tried the following:

string.valueof(new_application_dependency_record.Application_Workaround__cApplication_Workaround__c).length() == 0;

I also tried:

string.new_application_dependency_record.Application_Workaround__cApplication_Workaround__c.length() == 0;

None of these methods seem to ignore blank space or the <BR> tag.

What is the best practice for determining if a rich text field is truly blank?

Answer 1

You can remove all html tags (or just br if you want) and use isblank so that whitespace is not an issue.

String richtextstr = string.valueof(new_application_dependency_record.Application_Workaround__cApplication_Workaround__c);
richtextstr = richtextstr.replaceall('<.*>','');
string.isblank(richtextstr));