Text getting cut off in notification

[sgexcit]

I'm building a notification that is using three New-BTText items. The issue is without explanation it'll cut of sections of the text, or not show it at all. I've been able to side-step this a little with the New-BTHeader function (which creates some problems of it's own with text format). Is this a known issue? I tried using -MaxLines with New-BTText to force it, but that doesn't appear to do anything.

[Windos]

Hey @sgexcit, can you post some dummy examples of what you're trying to achieve?

[sgexcit]

Certainly!

Here is the example code (assuming BurntToast already installed and imported):

$AppID = (Get-StartApps | Where-Object {$_.name -eq "ApplicationXyz"} | Select "AppID").AppID
if ($AppID -eq $null)
{
    $AppID = (Get-StartApps | Where-Object {$_.name -eq "Settings"} | Select "AppID").AppID
}
$header1 = New-BTHeader -Title "Message from Company ABC"
$text1 = New-BTText -Text "Here is some information about this message. Here is some additional information about this message."
$text2 = New-BTText -Text "-"
$text3 = New-BTText -Text "IMPORTANT: Here is some really important information. This is about the length of the actual application message I am trying to send."
$button1 = New-BTButton -Content "Snooze" -Snooze
$button2 = New-BTButton -Content "Dismiss" -Dismiss
$action = New-BTAction -Buttons $button1, $button2
$binding = New-BTBinding -Children $text1, $text2, $text3
$visual = New-BTVisual -BindingGeneric $binding
$content = New-BTContent -Header $header1 -Visual $visual -Actions $action
Submit-BTNotification -AppID $AppID -Content $Content

This is what it outputs, note how it cuts off the ends of the sentences, and the Header bolds $text1 for some reason. What am I doing wrong?

[Windos]

This is going to go a bit into the weeds (Sorry! Just working through a thought process, will likely inform a blog post and a topic for documentation.)

We're stuck to working within the framework for these notifications provided to us by Microsoft. These text elements currently have the following caveats (as per the MS Docs):

• You must have one text element
• You can have two additional text elements, for a total of three
• The first element is always a "title", it is shown bold and can be up to 2 lines
• The other two text elements can use a total of 4 lines combined. This could be 3 lines for element 2 and 1 for element 3, or any other combination including element 2 consuming all 4 available lines.

You'll notice my screenshot does a decent job of actually showing the third and largest text element. This is just a difference in Windows version, I'm running 20H2 which changed how toasts display. It's no silver bullet, it just happens that the text is slightly smaller so it can fit more onto three lines. Anything from adding more text to the user increasing their desktop scaling could force the text out of sight.

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As an aside, the header (via New-BTHeader) is its own thing and is not included in these "text elements". The actual purpose of the headers is for categorization in the Action Center.

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One thing you could look to do is replace the line with the "-" with the second half of your title:

But as you can see, I'm now overflowing my four-line allocation... so no good!

My actual solution is to use a newish feature of BurntToast: columns (or "AdaptiveGroups" in the MS Docs)

$header1 = New-BTHeader -Title "Message from Company ABC"
$text1 = New-BTText -Text "Here is some information about this message."
$text2 = New-BTText -Text "Here is some additional information about this message."

$text3 = New-BTText -Text "IMPORTANT: Here is some really important information. This is about the length of the actual application message I am trying to send." -Wrap
$column1 = New-BTColumn -Children $text3

$button1 = New-BTButton -Content "Snooze" -Snooze
$button2 = New-BTButton -Content "Dismiss" -Dismiss
$action = New-BTAction -Buttons $button1, $button2
$binding = New-BTBinding -Children $text1, $text2 -Column $column1
$visual = New-BTVisual -BindingGeneric $binding
$content = New-BTContent -Header $header1 -Visual $visual -Actions $action
Submit-BTNotification -Content $Content

These columns are great for showing detailed data, I've got two demos of their use: Music Ticker & Weather.

Here, however, we've just doing a single column and dumping the text into it.

Note the -Wrap switch, by default text in a "column" will only use one line, that makes to wrap to multiples.

You can also control the style of the text here:

$text3 = New-BTText -Text "Column text example." -Wrap -Style Header

Yes, that's a very extreme example, but there's a lot of sane styles available via the -Style paramater.

n.b. that style thing is available on all text, but it only takes effect inside these columns, not the main body of the toast.

---

Sorry that was so long winded, hope it helped?

[sgexcit]

Please don't apologize, I'm extremely happy you took the time to explain all that. I think this column feature in conjunction with the header should do exactly what I need, or at the very least give me the breathing room to input the information I need at bare minimum.

This has been monumentally assistive. I'm going to dig into this and if I have any other issues I'll be sure to reply to this thread.