Adaptivecards: [JavaScript]Empty text with bold markdown shows a separator

[atishayv]

Platform

• JavaScript

Author or host

Host Name : Microsoft Search

Version of SDK

"adaptivecards": "2.0.0-rc.0"

Details

If a text block is wrapped under bold markdown and has empty text, it shows a separator.

Here is the adaptive card JSON for it :

{
    "type": "AdaptiveCard",
    "$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
    "version": "1.3",
    "body": [
        {
            "type": "TextBlock",
            "text": "__${title}__"
        }
    ],
   "$data": {
       "title" : ""
   }
}

Ideally it should show blank text.

[atishayv]

CC : @dclaux

[dclaux]

@atishayv that's an interesting corner case. Because the title is undefined, the final text is "____" which Markdown processes as a horizontal rule (three or more consecutive _ or * will generate a horizontal rule - https://commonmark.org/help/)

The solution is for you to configure your Markdown processor to not do this. There is nothing that AC can fix here since Markdown processing isn't built into the AC SDK.

The above solution will leave you with "____" as the text though. That's by design, for two reasons:

• The AC templating engine doesn't understand Markdown. As far as it's concerned, it's just processing an interpolated string
• The AC SDK doesn't understand Markdown nor interpolated strings. As far as it's concerned, it sees "____" with no way to reverse engineer it to determine that the _ characters were intended to make the result of a field binding bold.

If you really want to end up with a blank string, your best best would be to pre-process yourself.

[dclaux]

There is also a solution based on expressions:

"text": "${if(title, '__' + title + '__', ''}"

Or something like that. But I don't think it's a practical solution for your use case.

[atishayv]

Thanks @dclaux