Room – Unable to save room description with numbers only

[lanitochka17]

If you haven’t already, check out our contributing guidelines for onboarding and email contributors@expensify.com to request to join our Slack channel!

---

Version Number: 9.0.56-0 Reproducible in staging?: Y Reproducible in production?: N If this was caught on HybridApp, is this reproducible on New Expensify Standalone?: N/A If this was caught during regression testing, add the test name, ID and link from TestRail: N/A Email or phone of affected tester (no customers): applausetester+jp_11311024@applause.expensifail.com Issue reported by: Applause - Internal Team

Action Performed:

1. Go to https://staging.new.expensify.com/
2. Log
3. Create a workspace
4. Create a room without description
5. Open room chat
6. Click on header, open description
7. Enter few numbers into description and save

Expected Result:

Description is saved

Actual Result:

Description is empty

Workaround:

Unknown

Platforms:

Which of our officially supported platforms is this issue occurring on?

• [ ] Android: Standalone
• [ ] Android: HybridApp
• [x] Android: mWeb Chrome
• [ ] iOS: Standalone
• [ ] iOS: HybridApp
• [ ] iOS: mWeb Safari
• [x] MacOS: Chrome / Safari
• [ ] MacOS: Desktop

Screenshots/Videos

Add any screenshot/video evidence

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9a6cf043-6c88-4b89-a187-2c8d6b505534

View all open jobs on GitHub

[melvin-bot[bot]]

Triggered auto assignment to @Christinadobrzyn (Bug), see https://stackoverflow.com/c/expensify/questions/14418 for more details. Please add this bug to a GH project, as outlined in the SO.

[melvin-bot[bot]]

Triggered auto assignment to @Gonals (DeployBlockerCash), see https://stackoverflowteams.com/c/expensify/questions/9980/ for more details.

[melvin-bot[bot]]

💬 A slack conversation has been started in #expensify-open-source

[github-actions[bot]]

:wave: Friendly reminder that deploy blockers are time-sensitive ⏱ issues! Check out the open `StagingDeployCash` deploy checklist to see the list of PRs included in this release, then work quickly to do one of the following:

1. Identify the pull request that introduced this issue and revert it.
2. Find someone who can quickly fix the issue.
3. Fix the issue yourself.

[lanitochka17]

We think that this bug might be related to #wave-collect - Release 1

[lanitochka17]

Production:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a711e12c-4fac-4ebe-b514-3f62c6e459b5

[NJ-2020]

Regression PR: https://github.com/Expensify/App/pull/50838

It's because when we set the room description to a number e.g 2222222 and when displaying the room description, we use getReportDescription function for the report description value

Inside this function we will parse the report.description using JSON parse and return the html value, if there's an error meaning the value could not be parse or something else, we will simply return report.description https://github.com/Expensify/App/blob/6c33bba59c3305d59c96b265183473bc7ffed2e0/src/libs/ReportUtils.ts#L4261-L4271

When we set the room description something like testsd not a number, it will work because the JSON parse cannot parse string value which will run this return statement https://github.com/Expensify/App/blob/6c33bba59c3305d59c96b265183473bc7ffed2e0/src/libs/ReportUtils.ts#L4269-L4271

But when we set a number value inside the room description, the JSON parse did not throw an error instead returning the report description number in type of number not string

So when there's no error this catch block will not run https://github.com/Expensify/App/blob/6c33bba59c3305d59c96b265183473bc7ffed2e0/src/libs/ReportUtils.ts#L4269-L4271 But instead it will run this https://github.com/Expensify/App/blob/6c33bba59c3305d59c96b265183473bc7ffed2e0/src/libs/ReportUtils.ts#L4267-L4268 Since it's number so when we return objectDescription.html ?? '' it will return empty string

---

Instead of returning objectDescription.html ?? '' we can return this:

const reportDescription = report?.description;
const objectDescription = JSON.parse(reportDescription) as {html: string};
return objectDescription.html ?? report?.description ?? '';

[MuaazArshad]

Proposal

Please re-state the problem that we are trying to solve in this issue.

Unable to save room description with numbers only.

What is the root cause of that problem?

We are passing only strings for the room description; if we receive a number, it cannot be processed as a string. here https://github.com/Expensify/App/blob/6c33bba59c3305d59c96b265183473bc7ffed2e0/src/libs/ReportUtils.ts#L4265-L4271

What changes do you think we should make in order to solve the problem?

We should cast numbers to string before processing like this

try {
        const reportDescription = report?.description;
        const objectDescription = JSON.parse(reportDescription) as {html: string};
        const newObjectDescription = {html:String(objectDescription)};
        return newObjectDescription.html ?? '';
    } catch (error) {
        return report?.description ?? '';
    }

What alternative solutions did you explore? (Optional)

[Christinadobrzyn]

@Gonals I can reproduce this, can this go external? Is it a blocker?

[Beamanator]

@NJ-2020 -thanks for finding what looks like the regression, i pinged the PR authors in slack 🙏