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Extending the modeled attribute string length well beyond 500 charater limit

GregOlson
15-Moonstone

Extending the modeled attribute string length well beyond 500 charater limit

Has anyone done this?  I have a request that a document type be transferred into Windchill (essentially getting rid of the document by not having primary content), the content would be entered as attributes.  The question is, has anyone done anything like this?  One of the attribute strings would need to be increased to allow 4-5 thousand characters.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

We have increased an attribute to hold 1000 characters, however never tried to hold the contents of entire document.

We followed the method mentioned in Customizing Column Length .

Thanks

Binesh Kumar

Barry Wehmiller

View solution in original post

13 REPLIES 13

We have increased an attribute to hold 1000 characters, however never tried to hold the contents of entire document.

We followed the method mentioned in Customizing Column Length .

Thanks

Binesh Kumar

Barry Wehmiller

The max is 4000 characters.

Is there any downside to doing this?  You have fully tested this and running in production?

I just said that the max is 4000 characters. You won' t be able to set the size to 5000. We run this also in production mode.

I still hope that finally a WYSIWYG arrives. Then you can also document the changes etc. in a change object itself!  I would love to see that!

Bjorn,

I was not asking about character limits again...I read your first response.  I was asking if there was any downside to increasing to 4000...like retrieval times are horrible, or due to the size sometimes the UI won't render or any other degrade in performance.  BUT since you guys are running in production I would assume there are zero issues.  Thanks for the response.

There are no issues I'm aware of.

No issues that I am aware of. Running it in at least two production instances. Make sure the caches are sized good, indices are in place and dbstats are done frequenty

Thanks

Binesh Kumar

Barry Wehmiller International

GregOlson
15-Moonstone
(To:GregOlson)

Do you need InfoModeler to change the database?

BenPerry
13-Aquamarine
(To:GregOlson)

Greg Olson,

According to my experience, and Guilherme Rocha‌, InfoModeler is no longer required.  I would've needed it in 9.1.  But it worked without InfoModeler when I tried in 10.2.

We can refer to this discussion: 80 character limit.

GregOlson
15-Moonstone
(To:BenPerry)

Ben, does your testing confirm the below situation?

Increasing the character length will involve making changes to the StringValue database table. The catch in this is that all the string valued attributes across Windchill are stored in this table. Increasing the character limit on this table to 4k, would mean we are increasing the character limit for all the string attributes in Windchill to 4k – which would be an undesired condition. So to control the length of all the other string attributes suppose we introduce a character limit of 500 on them. But this might have some performance impact because then Windchill will have to apply the limit validation to all those strings before displaying them on the screen. In short we the situation will be that all the string attributes in the system will be of 4k length, and excepting one or two, we are putting a limit on all the others to limit them to 500.

BhushanNehe
14-Alexandrite
(To:GregOlson)

Hi Greg,

Yes, if you are increasing the limit for String attribute you will have to perform the steps on StringValue table and that would affect all the String attributes in the system. If that is undesirable you will have to limit it through type manager constraints, I believe this constraint is applied by default.

Did you try creating a Global attribute using AddColumns utility. There should be a way to increase the size of this particular column in the database table

Regards,

Bhushan

BenPerry
13-Aquamarine
(To:GregOlson)

Greg,

I used it only to increase the number of characters for a WTPart Number from 40 to 120 or something.  So my use case doesn't exactly match yours.  But I was happy to find out that in 10.2 I didn't need InfoModeler to get that job done.

This is last article from TS talking about 4000 characters limit.

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?source=subscription&n=CS213940

Marco
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