Formatting issues in exports and truncated answers in "View Answers"

[sigau]

Hello,

We have been working with RDMO for some time now and overall find it to be a very useful tool. Thank you for your work on this project.

During our use, we encountered several issues that affect readability, usability, and overall user experience of data management plans.

1. Loss of text formatting in exports

When exporting a DMP project (via the "Answers" export page, PDF export, or Markdown export), the text formatting entered by users is not preserved.

Specifically:

• Line breaks are not retained
• Paragraph structure is lost
• Overall readability of the report becomes confusing

Questions:

• Is this the expected behavior, or could this be a bug?
• Are there recommended workarounds to preserve formatting?

Related feature request:
Would it be possible to support basic text formatting directly in the questionnaire editor (e.g., line breaks, bold, italics)? Even minimal formatting options would significantly improve the readability of exported reports.

2. Truncated responses in "View Answers"

In some questions (for example, in Data Usage / Usage Scenarios, question:
"To what extent will infrastructure resources be required (e.g. CPU hours, bandwidth, storage space, etc.)?"), users can enter additional text in a field associated with a radio button.

However:

• In the "View Answers" mode, the full content of this text field is not visible
• The response appears truncated, making it difficult to review the complete answer

3. Visibility of project invitation notifications

Some of our users find that the notification for being added to a project is not visible enough.

Questions / requests:

• Is it possible to improve or customize the visibility of this notification?
• Since we have already customized several pages, could you indicate which HTML template(s) are responsible for this notification, so we could potentially modify it ourselves?

Expected behavior

• Exported documents should preserve basic text formatting (at least line breaks)
• "View Answers" should display the full content of user responses without truncation
• Project invitation notifications should be clearly visible to users

Environment

• RDMO version: 2.4.4
• Browser: firefox 149.0.2
• Deployment context: CCIN2P3 instance with basic modification

Thank you in advance for your help.

Best regards,
Gautier

[jochenklar]

Hi @sigau,

thanks for the issue! Regarding your first point: yes, this is a know limitation to RDMO (e.g. #1523) and I think we could fix it by alowing markdown in answers and the cleaning it properly (with #1509). So war we did not have the time/resources to work on this properly.

For the second point: can you clarify that you indeed meant "View Answers", because I think it works and displays option: additional_input. In the interview you can use a textarea as the type of Additional input to give the users more space to read and write the extra content.

For the last point: right now, the invites are displayed on the top of the projects table as part of the react application. You could make it more prominent using CSS and the class projects-header-buttons.

We are working on a complete overhaul of the RDMO User interface for quite some time now and this will (hopefully) also contain a system to notify users about e.g. maintenance events. Maybe invites should be included there as well.

And as a heads up, most of your template customization will probably not work anymore in the new system. We will use a system where django templates can be part of the rdmo-app/theme and then fetched by the React interface at defined locations (like for the interview now). It would be good to know where you "hooked" in to change the project page right now, so that we can prepare (empty) templates in RDMO this, which you then can overload.