Kenneth Newquist added a comment - 17/Jul/08 03:40 AM

Kenneth Newquist added a comment - 17/Jul/08 03:40 AM I can confirm this. The Online Text Assignment fails silently when you have an entry that's longer than 64K, because data1/data2 are set to the type 'text'. Changing it to 'mediumtext' will significantly increase the amount of text that can be stored (from 64K to 16 MB). This problem also effects Journal (and this is where I first saw the problem crop up) because it's mdl_journal_entries table has a similar limitation on its 'text' field – it's set to type 'text'. On our campus, the problem occurred while students were using Journal for internship journaling; half the class ran out of space in their journal's halfway through a summer term session (with entries containing 9,000 words, or 55,000 characters). This led me to see if Online Text Assignment had the same limitation, which it did. Making this change allowed me to add a 21,000 word, 116,000 character document without any problems.

A. T. Wyatt added a comment - 17/Jul/08 11:08 PM

A. T. Wyatt added a comment - 17/Jul/08 11:08 PM I would like to see this set as a default value. I should think it would be expecting too much for most people to fix this problem, since they are either unable or reluctant to make database changes.

Petr Skoda added a comment - 17/Jul/08 11:23 PM

Petr Skoda added a comment - 17/Jul/08 11:23 PM Hello, database changes are not allowed in STABLE branch, this will have to wait till 2.0 I would not personally recommend encouraging people to to type long essays there because browser may time out or something else might happen which would result in data loss. Petr

Kenneth Newquist added a comment - 21/Jul/08 10:13 PM

Kenneth Newquist added a comment - 21/Jul/08 10:13 PM While I agree that timeout's can be a problem, the way things are currently setup folks are already silently losing data because of the database field size limitation – they update their journal entry, save the text, and – unless they're paying attention – don't realize that they've lost text until they go back to edit it. If the field size isn't increased, then IMHO we need some mechanism for warning people that they're hitting the size limit (e.g. like Mediwiki's notice about editing files that are greater than 32kb in length). If it is increased, a similar mechanism could still be added (e.g. "Your entry is longer than the the recommended length of [foo] kb.)