field too long

[Gina Borden]

I have an ORU that I translate into an MDM message.  I am grabbing all the OBX.5 fields and setting them to a variable, then outputing them in one OBX.5 for the receiving system.  This all works well, with one exception:

Occasionally I will get a message that has a lot (2500 – 4000) of OBX lines.  The receiving system has a limit of 65536 characters, so therefore it is erroring on their side.

Any ideas on what/how I can fix this?  Also, I am new to Cloverleaf 5.8, and the tester completely hangs when I try to run this message through.

Any help or ideas are appreciated.

Thanks,

Gina

Topic

[Tom Rioux]

Years ago (at a previous employer) I wrote some code where the receiving system had a character limitation for the OBX.5.   The receiving system was able to handle a “continuation pointer.”   This is basically a flag stating that the results will be continued in the next message.    

I’m not sure if your vendor can handle something like this.  It was a long time ago and I’m sure there may be other ways of doing this these days.

Hope this helps…

Tom Rioux

[Jim Kosloskey]

As Tom said you can use the DSC HL/7 segment and generate multiple messages  if the receiving system supports it – or you can do what we have done here at times which is to indicate to the receiving system it is a truncated OBX-5. This will require some Tcl.

That typically requires the receiving system can tolerate a truncated OBX-5 and still perform its mission and also assumes an agreement can be reached as to how to indicate the data is truncated.

If none of the above are possible, then another alternative is to negotiate with the vendor to provide either more capacity or a continuation ot truncation support methodology I would think.

So basically there is nothing wrong with what you are doing that needs to be ‘fixed’ it is the Receiving system which needs the repair but you may be able to provide accomodations if the Receiving system has some flexibility.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

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