Character Limit Count in Text Field

RE: Character Limit Count in Text Field

Stefan Helzle — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 14:53:46 GMT

OK. Thanks a ton for this insight. And it makes me hoping even more for you lifting this limitation soon.

RE: Character Limit Count in Text Field

Peter Lewis — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 14:50:53 GMT

Yes, the same length considerations apply to the 4000 limit for a field in synced record types - it uses bytes and not true characters.

RE: Character Limit Count in Text Field

Stefan Helzle — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 06:43:11 GMT

I just looked up the documentation:

While the Appian platform itself is not affected by these limitations, the database can only store 255 bytes in a VARCHAR(255) field, and you could end up with space for only 63 actual characters.

Peter Lewis , what about the 4000 text length limitation in synced records, is this bytes or characters?

RE: Character Limit Count in Text Field

Yogi Patel — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 06:11:16 GMT

Peter Lewis Thanks for sharing details. Its seems that fn!lenb function is used to check length. You can write your own custom validation using fn!len() function as mention by Stefan Helzle and Dan Lluhi

This applies to a!paragraphField as well.

RE: Character Limit Count in Text Field

Peter Lewis — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 19:16:06 GMT

It is behaving as designed - since most limits are designed to limit the amount of data that can be written to the database, the character limit is designed to count multiple characters if the byte representation is higher.

Like Dan suggested, the best approach is to add a different validation if you want to validate differently.

RE: Character Limit Count in Text Field

Stefan Helzle — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 15:31:09 GMT

That's interesting! Counting characters by the bytes they use is a problematic approach.

Peter Lewis, is that a known issue? I typed two Korean characters into a text field and it counted it as 6 characters. That's not exactly intuitive.

RE: Character Limit Count in Text Field

annad7195 — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 13:41:35 GMT

Okay, great, thanks, I will try it!

RE: Character Limit Count in Text Field

Dan Lluhi — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 13:25:31 GMT

The characterLimit description reads "characterLimit (Number (Integer)): Determines the maximum number of characters. Depending on the language, some characters may count as more than one."

It looks like fn!len() might count the character lengths as 1 instead of 2, so your best bet may be to write your own character limit validation using fn!len() instead of using the built-in characterLimit parameter