ServiceNow Data Action 400 Error with Nested JSON Payloads

NICE CXone API & Integrations
1

Configuration is broken for some reason… when attempting to push digital channel interaction data to ServiceNow via a Genesys Cloud Data Action. The standard POST to our internal REST API succeeds, but the subsequent PATCH to update the incident record fails with a HTTP 400 Bad Request. The error response from ServiceNow indicates a JSON parsing failure on the work_notes field, specifically complaining about unexpected tokens.

The Architect flow constructs the JSON payload using string concatenation and the json_encode function. I have verified the payload structure in the flow debug logs, and it appears valid. However, the Data Action execution log shows a truncated or malformed body being sent.

“The Data Action component serializes the request body as application/json. Ensure all special characters are properly escaped before transmission.”

I am using the latest Genesys Cloud platform version. The ServiceNow instance is Quebec. The issue seems to stem from how Genesys handles newlines or quotes within the digital message transcript before passing it to the Data Action. Has anyone encountered similar serialization issues with long text fields in digital channel transcripts? The flow ID is f7a3b2c1-9999-4444-8888-1234567890ab. I need to ensure the integrity of the transcript data for compliance audits.

2

The best way to fix this is to ensure the work_notes field is properly escaped as a string within the JSON payload. ServiceNow often rejects raw objects or unescaped newlines in text fields.

Inspect the HTTP body being sent. The issue likely stems from special characters in the interaction transcript breaking the JSON structure. Wrap the value in double quotes and escape any internal quotes or line breaks.

{
 "work_notes": "New note: \"Customer called regarding billing.\""
}

If the data contains newlines, replace them with \n explicitly before serialization. Genesys Cloud Data Actions handle standard JSON well, but nested strings with unescaped quotes will trigger a 400 Bad Request on the receiving end. Verify the payload in a tool like Postman to isolate the syntax error.