Blog Post: What's the Maximum Size of Opalis Custom Start Parameters?

I saw this question on an internal discussion list recently, and then someone else asked me about it, so I thought I'd answer it here to be helpful.

The question was:

Is there a maximum length for string parameters in the Opalis custom start object?
And if the answer is ?yes? ? what would the maximum length for string parameters be?

And my answer:

When you use a ?Trigger Policy? object to invoke another policy, the parameters used have to be less than 2000 characters, but that doesn?t mean the actual data the target policy uses has to be less than 2000 characters. I?ll explain?

The ?Value? field of the Trigger Policy Parameters is limited to 2000 characters:

This means you can specify a string directly in the input box on the object up to 2000 characters in length. However, most people are not going to type in a static string of that length. It will typically be a reference to another property on the data bus using the ?Subscribe to? functionality:

Stored in the DB, it looks like this:

So this is storing a reference to another object?s instance-specific data in the DB, not copying the data itself across multiple objects.

In this case, the text length is actually short, even though the data behind it could be huge because each object (Custom Start Objects included) has an NTEXT field associated with the data value for each property. So how huge is the available space for a single property value? According to MSDN, an NTEXT field can store 2^30 - 1 (1,073,741,823) characters. That?s pretty big!

Ivana Bozilovic Cristina Dumitru Cat Power January Jones Christina DaRe