Control Field Length

My .02:

There are some vendors out there (one big one comes to mind) that either don’t know or refuse to know what the field lengths are for their messages.

Other vendors do specify lengths and some are longer than the standard.

So an expedient way to handle the first type of vendor is to mark each field unlimited length in older Cloverleaf releases. That gets to be a hassle so in a later release one can declare all fields unlimited.

OK so this is me talking. I would rather close myself in a room with the vendor with an unlimited supply of Mexican food and one roll of toilet paper until the vendor commits to the length of every field they want or will provide. If some exceed the standard length I would change only those fields and typically to the specified limit. There are some fields which by nature probably should be unlimited (like OBX-5).

So I am not an advocate of this global field length override but I understand why people do it.

The danger (and I have observed this first hand) comes when a receiving system really does have a limit but will not define it and not until after a lot of messages result in errors because the actual application is sensitive to the data length.

Then one has to turn this option off and suddenly expose other fields to potential truncation so that the recognized field can be constrained – that is a lot of work.

First, Jim thank you for the new team building exercise with Mexican food.  I can think of plenty of applications for that method!   😀

On a serious note, is there a performance impact to enabling that global configuration?

While I agree with Jim the preferred approach should be adherence to the standard, our experience is we get hurt more by things being truncated via Xlate then we do sending content that is too long.  As long as there isn’t a performance hit to checking the box, I believe our site will make it the default for new work.

Thanks,

Can anyone please address my question?  If one checks “Do not truncate any field content”, is there any significant performance impact to the engine for that thread/Xlate?

Thanks,

Robert,

Here is my opinion which is not based on any real measurement.

My suspicion is there would not be any performance hit.