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What is the maximum number of characters for a Lotus Notes text field? In Lotus Notes clients, I am encountering a 32K error.

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Guess you found it... –  Chris Lively Apr 30 '09 at 17:20

4 Answers 4

up vote -1 down vote accepted

The default max length for a text field is 254 characters. The maximum length allowed for a text field is 15,360 characters.

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This is an oldie but a goodie. I had to work that one out the hard way using a binary chop approach to isolate the actualy number. Some good advice about getting around it goo.gl/S1Q9x and a technote from IBM goo.gl/ON50x –  giulio Jul 4 '13 at 23:54

There is no "default limit" of 254 characters on a text field in Lotus Notes and Domino. Limits that small only come into play in a few cases, like the size of a string written or read from notes.ini, or from an ACL entry.

The answer according to IBM in the Domino Designer 8.5.x help files is that a text field has a limit 32k bytes. However the Notes 8.5.x C API help files state that the maximum size of an item is 64k bytes, however if the summary flag is set the maximum size is 32k. The summary flag is required for text fields that are used in view columns, and Notes forms always assume that the flag is set. You have to use LotusScript or Java or Notes C API code to work with non-summary items.

Two things complicate this: 1) If there are other summary items stored in the document, each summary text item is competing with all other summary items for space in the summary buffer (which is where view data comes from), and that limit is also 32k. And 2) older versions of Lotus Notes and Domino had a 15k limit on the summary buffer, but it is unclear to me whether it is just the Notes and Domino software version, or the on-disk storage (ODS) version of the NSF file that impacts the summary buffer size.

So, the best information is that you can have a computed-for-display text field of up to 64k, and you may be able to have a stored non-summary text field of up to 64k, but if it is an ordinary summary text field the limit is either 15k or 32k depending on the version of software, and maybe also depending on the ODS.

Bear in mind that LMBCS characters may be multi-byte, so a 32k limit does not necessarily imply 32k characters.

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Depending on what you are trying to do, you can use a Notes rich-text field, which does not have the 32k size restriction. So, you could use this "rich-text" field to store text only - this is essentially accomplishing the setting of the .isSummary attribute to false, but does not require you to add any script code. Rich-text fields cannot be rendered in views.

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It is a bit more complicated than that - depending on the version you can increase the size of text fields to 32K by setting the .isSummary property of the NotesItem for the field using the Lotusscript QuerySave event, however this will mean you can't display data from the field in views.

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