Reply To: How to overcome OBX-5 size limit?

[Russ Ross]

Kevin Crist wrote:

Code:

Does anyone have any examples or some details about how to setup a pdf with a pointer. i am wondering if this will be the best way to go but have not a clue how to get there.

The time I did this sort of thing, I was fortunate enough to be included in the design early on but after everyone had gotten hostile because they couldn’t figure out how to effectively send across massive amounts of giant documents.

I was able to calm down the troubled project team by convincing them to use the pointer method.

I still remember how crazy and upset they had become with frustration prior to my participation.

That first brainstorming session was quite intertaining being the only sane and calm person in the room, while all the others had snapped with frustration and verbally imploding as a group against each other.

I even think some restraining orders were issued.

I was able to get both parties to agree on using a document pointer and not have the source system application send the document in the message from the start.

So happily the source application was made to send a pointer to the document, which was either a URL or a fully qualified filename to a shared drive including the path.  

I’m thinking it was a URL but this was too many years back for me to remember specifically.

I was aware of the -1 for unlimited field size back then but we all agreed that would take more than its fair share of the cloverleaf integration engine, plus we knew a document could have HL7 delimiter characters in it and I didn’t know about base64 encoding way back then as a way around this problem.

The downstream receiving application was modified to use the document pointer to retreive/access the document as needed.

Unfortuately, I’m not always so fortuante to be involved early on in the integration design and have to deal with legacy applications.

Consequently, I do have a DMS to TRAN integration that does send the document in the message.

We discovered that some people are nuts and create documents so ridicuously large that infinite size is almost too small for them.

So I gree that you still want to limit the size to whatever the largest limit is agreed on because someone will find a way to exceed it.

My approach was to check the documents size and set a flag in the user meta data to note the doucment had been truncated because it was deemed too large.

Then the desired appropriate actions could be taken when encoutering the user metadat flag being turned on.

In my case wording was added to the end of the document stating it was too large and had been truncated and email/page alerts would be sent out to support personnel to resolve.

Here is a URL I posted illustrating exactly how I set the user metat data in the xlate and how I retrieved it downstream in the outobund protocol UPOC:

<a href="https://usspvlclovertch2.infor.com/viewtopic.php?t=1367&&#8221; class=”bbcode_url”>https://usspvlclovertch2.infor.com/viewtopic.php?t=1367&amp;

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com