Why are the line breaks removed from my text area fields when they are inserted into the incident thread via a business rule?

Environment:

Text Area type Custom Fields, Appended via Business Rules
Oracle B2C Service, All supported versions

Issue:

When the contents of a text area or text field custom field are appended to the incident thread using variables, the line breaks are removed.

Resolution:

This behavior is expected because the text area custom fields store data in plain text format. When a variable is applied to a thread entry, the content of the variable is inserted as plain text content in an HTML environment. This removes the line breaks in the text area field and inserts everything as a single string.

The only ways to insert the contents of a text area field and keep the line breaks is to manually insert the appropriate line breaks in a thread entry while the thread editor is in rich text mode or insert <br/> at each line break in the custom field or change the thread type to plain text.