How can we deal with field size limits?

HCL Notes/Domino 8.5 Forum (includes Notes Traveler)

Subject: How can we deal with field size limits?

Feedback Type: Problem

Product Area: Notes Client

Technical Area: Functionality

Platform: Windows - 64 bit

Release: 8.5.1

Reproducible: Intermittent

According to the 8.5.1 documentation for the NotesItem.AppendToTextList method, a text list field should have a size limit of 64K. Checking the help documents in releases prior to 8, no size limit is listed - are we to assume 32K, the normal limit for text fields?

How can you tell ahead of time if your data will fit? It has been my observation that the encoding used varies - how can you determine in LotusScript if single, double, triple, or ??? byte encoding will be used?

One way to test if the data will fit is to repeatedly call NotesItem.AppendToTextList() until it throws an error. However, the error thrown might be 4000, might be 4360, or maybe no error will be thrown in the code at all and Notes will complain directly to the Notes client:
"Field is too large (32K) or View's column & selection formulas are too large"

Also, AppendToTextList() is annoyingly slow - hundreds of successive calls to it will cause quite a delay in the Notes client.

All of these issues make it very difficult to deal with data that borders on or exceeds the field size limit.

Feedback number WEBB82LVMH created by ~Dean Dwoboosiplopjip on 02/12/2010

Status: Open
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