Maximum Comment Length Exceeded

[Robotman]

Question: Why do I get this message on some topics but not on others?

maxLength.png

I have some htm topics that are 50 characters long and whilst it doesn't seem to work on those, at the same time it doesn't seem consistent (as I have other projects with long topics and it does work on those).

[RamonS]

Any chance that there are spaces or CRLF? Those get counted as characters and may cause the message to appear. Other than that, I'm as surprised as you are.

[Robotman]

Any chance that there are spaces or CRLF? Those get counted as characters and may cause the message to appear. Other than that, I'm as surprised as you are.

None. I repeated the same process on multiple topics (in IE with the same result (not all topics had this message). Strangely, I opened the doc up in Firefox and didn't get that message.

I'll do some other testing on it when I have time (never!) and I'll try to narrow the problem down.

[RamonS]

Seems obvious, IE is broken and FF is not. So stop using IE.

[Robotman]

I love FF, but standards dictate that the feedback process must use IE.

I cannot recall whether I've seen the issue using FF yet (dismissed the issue when we were using the trial software).

[RamonS]

And I guess there is no chance to change the ill-designed standard? Sorry, I have no solution for this other than using what is known to work.

[Robotman]

And I guess there is no chance to change the ill-designed standard? Sorry, I have no solution for this other than using what is known to work.

Well, let me say we're a fairly small company (under 20) and we're using Feedback Server internally only (as a review tool) so we're flexible. But truth is we like to have these systems working on all major platforms (because even though we're using it internally, there is scope to put this to clients and if it doesn't work on IE then we really can't use it). IE is a standard amongst our clients so it has to be ours as well.

Another issue I've discovered (again, not sure if this is FF / IE related) is that some topics can't be selected (webhelp). It might happen to 10% of the topics where they're listed in the left hand pane, but selecting it seems to cause a minor javascript void error and the topic doesn't appear. I don't know what causes it and republishing it doesn't seem to help.

Again, if I had time I'd do a full investigation I would but as a small business I have more important work to do.

[Robotman]

Seems obvious, IE is broken and FF is not. So stop using IE.

RamonS, seems the problem is both FF and IE (8).

The thing is, both browsers give me different character lengths that I've exceeded the maximum length by.

[BrianB]

FYI, MadCap Support has been very helpful to me with a case that's very similar to what you describe. We were frequently encountering maximum error length messages, even with short error text. MadCap's developers have said this is a result of a limitation of Internet Explorer URL lengths. Since IE is the primary supported browser for my company's products and services, this currently limits us to deploying feedback collection only, and not comment collection. With comments, the Feedback Server/Service collects a hash (combination) of the topic URL, a topic ID, and the comment text. With long URLs, IE can choke on the resulting hash. Firefox and Safari accept longer URLs, so the maximum error length message is rate. Again, I don't know that this is actually the root cause for your problem, but it sounds similar. Best of luck with resolution.

[Robotman]

It sounds like a very similar issue. And whilst not the correct solution in the short-term we've decided to use DotNet output with Feedback Server as our primary reason for getting FS was as an internal review process (and it's working quite nicely although there's a few enhancements I'd like to see - of which I'll send to Madcap once we've been using it for a few months).

Alvaro (Madcap Support) sent me some tests to perform but it's getting the time to perform them versus just using DotNet (where I haven't seen the issue at all).