Sparx Systems Forum

Enterprise Architect => General Board => Topic started by: PWarren on March 13, 2019, 01:15:01 am

Title: Character Limit of Class Element Notes Field?
Post by: PWarren on March 13, 2019, 01:15:01 am

Good day All,

I'm curious if there is a character limit for specifically the Notes field or area for the Class element. The current client I am contracted with is using a bit of a kludge in order to generate HTML, which is linked from a MS Word document.

The class element contains the titles of processes and uses the hyperlink feature to the diagrams, for reporting purposes. This is all stitched together using a VB macro embedded in the MS Word document. (The Word document is converted to .htm and deployed to a web server, along with the EA generated HTML. The Word.htm is used as a navigational tool.)

The following is their current statistics/totals:
Characters (without blanks): 17,685
Words: 4,094
Lines: 403
Current document length: 18,491

The issue some users are experiencing is while editing, adding additional text titles and hyperlinks or just scrolling from top to bottom, EA locks up, and the error seems to be a memory issue:

The instruction at 0X0...0865B9C0 referenced memory at 0X...025E17FCC. The memory could not be read.

Click OK to terminate the program.
Click on CANCEL to debug the program.

I've communicated to the others that they should not be copying and pasting the title text from applications like MS Word or Excel or HTML web pages, in case it is extraneous characters or formatting, which does cause issues elsewhere in EA. My best guess is this client is exceeding the intended character limit and usage of this text field.

Any input?

Thanks in advance!

Title: Re: Character Limit of Class Element Notes Field?
Post by: Geert Bellekens on March 13, 2019, 01:23:47 am

Notes are text or varchar(max) or ... (depends on database type) fields and have (almost) no limit, so I doubt that is the problem.

What I'm thinking is that EA chokes when trying to process all of note data. Especially if there is lots of formatting, or special characters in the text.

See if you have the same problem with plain text without any special characters (or "<" and ">")

I remember seeing EA crash when we pasted text from a pdf file that contained some kind of special backtick "`"

Geert

Title: Re: Character Limit of Class Element Notes Field?
Post by: qwerty on March 13, 2019, 02:37:46 am

You should just report that as bug.

q.

Title: Re: Character Limit of Class Element Notes Field?
Post by: Sunshine on March 13, 2019, 06:02:14 am

Quote from: Geert Bellekens on March 13, 2019, 01:23:47 am

I remember seeing EA crash when we pasted text from a pdf file that contained some kind of special backtick "`"

I believe its called Grave accent.

Title: Re: Character Limit of Class Element Notes Field?
Post by: PWarren on March 13, 2019, 07:06:27 am

I strip off any formatting by pasting it into Notepad++ first then into the class element. BUT, the text is then hyperlinked to the diagrams.

It seems those users with laptops having only 16GB of RAM or less have this issue, while my 32GB or RAM I do not lock up while scrolling.

A while back, when I started this current contract, I went through the entire text area and did a clean up by copying what was in the text area to Notepad++ and back into the text area. That seemed to alleviate the issues we had back then, but again some users are having this scrolling issue.

Any ways, thanks everyone for the input! Think I will do as suggested and submit an issue report to technical next.

Title: Re: Character Limit of Class Element Notes Field?
Post by: steen.jensen on March 13, 2019, 08:58:28 am

I dont think your memory is the problem as EA is still 32 bit windows program using max 3 GByte ram in any Windows version