Hi Michiel,

Many thanks for you in-depth reply!  It certainly answered my question : )

The reason for the long 'Symptom' is that we are using OTRS FAQ as a knowledgebase, into which I am copying and pasting a lot of text.  

I am going to try edit the FAQ layout so you can't see the Symptom, Problem and Solution fields as it doesn't really suit the format we would like.

Your suggestion of changing the field type to mediumtext worked perfectly thank you very much for that!

Kind Regards,

Emily Flynn


Michiel Beijen <michiel@beefreeit.nl>
Sent by: otrs-bounces@otrs.org

27/05/2009 20:33
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Re: [otrs] Max characters per faq





Hi Emily,

You did not mention what FAQ version and database make/model you are using, but on MySQL the fields are defined as "text" which makes it not able to hold more than 2^16 characters. It will truncate the string and not tell you. If you'd save the FAQ article and open it, it will 'only' display the first 65000 characters, the rest will be gone...

I have inserted some large chunks of Kafka into new FAQ entries on my test environment. The Symptom field is stored in the field called f_field1 on the faq_item table, as is defined in Admin > Sysconfig > FAQ > Core::Item > FAQ::Item::Field1. The fields are limited at 65535 characters, to be precise.
mysql> select length(f_field1) from faq_item;
+------------------+
| length(f_field1) |
+------------------+
|               31 |
|              107 |
|              168 |
|            65535 |
|            65535 |
+------------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Then I found this post about the storage capacities of 'text' type fields in mysql: http://simonwillison.net/2002/Aug/1/mysqlTextLimits/

That made me wonder if this is present in more places in OTRS:
mysql> select table_name, column_name from information_schema.columns where data_type = 'text';
+-------------------+---------------+
| table_name        | column_name   |
+-------------------+---------------+
| article           | a_from        |
| article           | a_reply_to    |
| article           | a_to          |
| article           | a_cc          |
| article           | a_subject     |
| article           | a_message_id  |
| article_search    | a_from        |
| article_search    | a_to          |
| article_search    | a_cc          |
| article_search    | a_subject     |
| article_search    | a_message_id  |
| auto_response     | text0         |
| auto_response     | text1         |
| auto_response     | text2         |
| faq_item          | f_keywords    |
| faq_item          | f_field1      |
| faq_item          | f_field2      |
| faq_item          | f_field3      |
| faq_item          | f_field4      |
| faq_item          | f_field5      |
| faq_item          | f_field6      |
| notifications     | text          |
| salutation        | text          |
| sessions          | session_value |
| signature         | text          |
| standard_response | text          |
+-------------------+---------------+
26 rows in set (0.12 sec)

But as you can see only in places where it makes sense (at least to me) the 'text' type is used... except in the faq_item table. Personally, I find symptoms of > 65535 bytes a bit long but I think that should be possible. Also I think it the Problem and Solution fields should be able to handle real long amounts of text and AT LEAST the system should complain instead of silently truncating your texts.

As a quick hack, you could change the field type in the database to 'mediumtext' type which can keep a maximum of 2^32 characters which is about 4.294.967.296.

mysql> alter table `faq_item` change `f_field1` `f_field1` MEDIUMTEXT;
Query OK, 5 rows affected (0.14 sec)
Records: 5  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

You'd probably want to do the same to the fields f_field2 ("Problem") and f_field3 ("Solution").

The field lenghts are defined in the OPML file which is here: ftp://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/packages/FAQ-1.5.4.opm - there you see the fields are defined as storing 20000 characters, MySQL then creates them with the 'text' datatype.

I would like to ask you if you can file this bug in Bugzilla (http://bugs.otrs.org) so it may be resolved in the next version of the FAQ module.

Kind regards,
--
Michiel Beijen
Software Consultant
+31 6 - 457 42 418
Bee Free IT + http://beefreeit.nl
On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 17:57, Emily Flynn <emily.flynn@zurichbank.com> wrote:

Hi!

I am inputting a lot of information into the FAQ module at the minute, but there seems to be a max amount of characters allowed in the Symptoms dialog box.. how can I change this to increase the limit..?  I couldn't see anything in the normal sysconfig section.

Thanks.


Kind Regards,

Emily Flynn


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