MsgBuilder Variable in Email cut short

Hello,

I'm hoping someone knows why this is happening - I am building a variable via MsgBuilder that contains action results that are then put into an email and sent to users. However, it seems that the variable is cut short if it gets too long (it seems to be cutting out halfway through the 23rd action/line). The variable is not huge - It's getting cut short after only ~1,800 - 2,000 characters. I haven't had this same issue in designer.

The email node is set to HTML content and contains other text below this variable so it's not cutting the whole email short, just this one variable.

Any thoughts on why this would happen?

Thanks,

Kyle

Infor Landmark Technology_11.0.X_Overview_08142020.pdf

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unknown

Does the contents of the variable contain any special character? If you don't see anything, try writing the variable to a file and then open the file in a text editor that allows you to look at it in binary, like notepad++ or text pad.

Reimagining Global Ledger.pdf

unknown

String variables have a character size limit around the 2000 chars (sorry I don't recall the exact count).

The only way we found around this was to save the data to the _inputData workunit variable which can hold pretty large values (not sure what's the limit here but it is big) and then you can call the _inputData value anywhere in your flow, including your Email body.

In order to update your _inputData you would do a landmark Create action on the PfiWorkunitInputData business class, something like this:

_dataArea="prod" & _module="pfi" & _objectName="PfiWorkunitInputData" & _actionName="Create" & _actionOperator="NONE" & _actionType="SingleRecordQuery" & _runAsUser="" & _authenticatedUser="" & _pageSize="30" & _relationName="" & _setName="" & _asOfDate="" & _effectiveDate="" & PfiWorkunit="<!WorkUnit>" & Description=""MyHTML"" & TextData="<!Insert your HTML data/variable here>" & Type="2" & CreationDate

In order to use the value stored simply use _inputData

andy

Check out this thread...

community.inforxtreme.com/.../create-csv-to-use-an-attachment-in-an-email

unknown

I just opened the PFIACTIVITYVARIABLE table definition and confirmed that the VARIABLEVALUE max size is indeed 2048 characters.

When a flow kicks off and before it hits a User Action node (and some other few nodes that I can't recall now) the string variable does not enforce this limitation because it is being kept in memory, but after a User Action node all the variable values get pulled directly from the database (not from memory anymore) which does enforce the character limitation and as a result it returns your string truncated to 2048 characters.

I'm no Infor/Lawson expert, just sharing my experience while dealing with this issue. Writing the HTML code to the _inputData proved to be a pretty simple and clean way to work around this.

All comments

unknown

Reimagining Global Ledger.pdf

unknown

I have had this similar thing occur to me as well. There is a limitation in the output of a msgbuilder node. I ended up using 2 msgbuilder nodes.

andy

I believe this has been addressed on the forum before, but I can't seem to find the thread.

As I recall it's related to variable scope / memory management. Because of this issue, I always write large message builders to temp output files with file access nodes, and then delete them at the end of the flow.

unknown

I've checked that and don't think it's related to that as it only contains Lawson action responses (i.e. 'Change Complete - Continue').

unknown

I was wondering if it was a memory issue, but it didn't seem that big compared to some previous ones I've used. I may end up trying that route. I can see in the log that it's writing all the bytes to the builder. It's just not including them in the email.

unknown

Thank you for the ideas and help everyone! I'll update this if I find a solution (outside of writing to a file).

New ERs since March 2020 meeting_050820.xlsx

unknown

I have never seen a a 2000 (ish) char limit. I have commonly used variables with many thousands of characters. Is this documented somewhere?

andy

Check out this thread...

community.inforxtreme.com/.../create-csv-to-use-an-attachment-in-an-email

unknown

Thanks! I am receiving exactly this: variable is over 1k length. It just didn't seem large enough to warrant this. I'll look to store the data in another way and call it back to the email or attach it depending.

unknown

Thanks Josue.

Josue makes a good point, this character limitation should only be enforced if used after a User Action node.

unknown

I did not realize this changed after a user action node though it makes sense. We're not currently using a lot of user actions so my experience with them is limited. The flow in question does contain a user action node.

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