Workflow actions no longer escape control characters

April 17, 2025

The APEX AIOps Incident Management team has changed the way control characters (\n, \t, etc.) inside workflow actions are escaped.

Previously, all control characters inside payload properties of a workflow action were escaped each time they passed through an action, leading to the accumulation of backslashes. This behavior caused issues when sending payloads to external systems with the Send to Endpoint action.

For example, when sending a payload to ServiceNow, any carriage returns might be escaped multiple times. This would result in a string like \\\\n being sent to ServiceNow, causing the resulting ServiceNow description to not be formatted properly.

Starting April 17, 2025, workflow actions will no longer escape control characters used inside any fields. When data is sent to a webhook using the Send to Endpoint action, the webhook will escape the control characters inside the payload once before forwarding to the outbound system. This ensures that all control characters sent to outbound systems are only escaped a single time.

If you have existing workflows that relied on the previous behavior, please review and adjust them accordingly to make sure they continue functioning.