Clear item description

ERPNext
1

When an item description was entered and gets cleared there is still text stored in the database:

'description': '<div><br></div>',

How to clear the description completely in the web interface? I know that I can do this by using the REST API - but this is no option for a normal user …

2

What do you mean by this?

3

Set it to an empty string: “”

In many cases I do not need a description. It is not possible to empty the description completely in any way. With my tests I found that it is also not possible to wirte an empty string to description by REST. When I do so the description is set to the item name.

I see no good reason why the description can’t be empty. Also funny: description isn’t set to mandatory but it can’t be empty … a contradiction …

Why alle this? IMHO this leads to unnecessary confusion in Jinja print templates. My current ugly workaround looks like this:

{% if n.item_name != n.description|striptags|trim %}
    {% if n.description|striptags|trim != '' %}
        <br><div class="text-small">{{ n.description }}</div>
    {% endif %}
{% endif %}
4

can you explain any such cases to guide accordingly, where is Item Desc being fetched when it is not required?

5

That’s not the problem. E.g. in sales invoices it is necessary that the description is fetched as there may be content wich has to be printed. Its easy to check if it’s empty or not and then print it or don’t. If it contains “arbitrary garbage” this is unnecessarily hard.

Why all this? I don’t want to have an unnecessary DIV tag wich consumes unnecessarily valuable space. See my code example in my last post.

Please explain to me why the description can’t be empty. And why the name of the item gets copied when the description is empty. IMHO there is no good reason for this.