@Randy, only a guess but possibly your JSON from the long text is thrown of by line breaks? I'd render the JSON to the template itself to see what the data looks like.

i double checked and there are no line breaks in any of my JSON and it renders fine like a normal JSON.. which makes it very strange on why it wouldn’t work. I had a guess that it might have been an asynchronous issue where it’s trying to eval prior to it getting the JSON from the record, but I wrapped it in an <#if> and it didn’t help.

Hmmm, only other thought to try would be to assign the json and then assign that assigned variable json with the ?eval. I'm no freemarker expert though...

haha I actually tried that as well and it didn’t work. At least I have reassurance that I tried all the stuff you thought of as well.