I have had major difficulties in getting very large text fields to display.

I know the following: Defines can be used to break up the field into 2 or more pieces, and there is a max number of characters allowed per text field.

My experience with large text fields has been:

Defines do not work if the original text field exceeds the max number of characters allowed.

Text field must be the final field displayed on a report. This forces me to work with compounded pdf reports.

Any text field beyond the max length causes WebFOCUS to truncate all report output from that point on. This includes all following compounded pdf reports that have nothing to do with the report that includes the large text field.

My question is: does anyone know of any improvements to the handling of large text fields in newer versions?

Thanks, vickie

How long is the text field in your database? I believe WebFOCUS can have Alphanumeric fields of up to A4095 since version 4.3.x. Is this long enough to handle your field lengths?

Unfortunately the text field created by systems is 7,000 in length. Reporting off of the database would have been a great consideration had anyone thought of it when the database was created!

vickie

What is your database and how is it defined? CLOB or VARCHAR? I don't think this format limit for Alphanumerics has been increased in recent releases. Sorry.

The database is an SQL 2000 with variable characters.

Thanks for responding Mickey...vickie

Have your DBA create a "View" that breaks the long text field into 2 or more shorter fields.

Sample: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;283886&Product=sql2k

Or you could possibly use SQL pass-through and do it yourself !!

Great idea! Thanks, Terry

Vickie,

Have you tried creating an MFD with a field definition of an A7000 just to see if it would work? Since your SQL 2000 table field is a variable character and not a CLOB it's worth a shot. You can then use WRAP to make the string fit reasonably on a report.

FIELDNAME=LONGTEXT, ALIAS=LONGTEXT, A7000, A7000,$

I just came across an issue where if a field has data with more than 1064 characters, and you're creating a PDF - the job agent will crash. It's not a problem with HTML or Excel output - only PDF's. I don't think it's an issue on 7.1.

What width are using to wrap the column? Are you outputing portrait or landscape?

Lenny

The WRAP and paper orientation have no impact - tried 'em all.

We're starting to test WF 7.1 and when I ran the same program on 7.1 it ran without any issues so I'm pretty sure it's a bug and I've placed a case with IBI.

I also tried -READing it into a variable and placing it in a HEADING/SUBFOOT and it crashed as well.

It's pretty much a showstopper for the application I'm working on and I've tried everything I can think of.

Update to my problem with large text fields. A stored procedure was created to break down the text by looking for carriage returns. Actually works very well with the paragraphs staying intact.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

vickie