I agree wholeheartedly with Lars that DE names of 150 or 200 or 230 characters are to be avoided whenever possible - my personal preference has always been to try to keep them well under 100 characters. BUT Crizelle obviously also have a point - it’s not good practice to specify one length in the db and another in the UI.
My advice would be to look closely at the option of reducing those >160 to <=160 though - if you set up the “old” and the “new” in a small match file, it should be reasonably easy to update both DHIS2 and DHIS 1.4 instances?
···
On 6 March 2015 at 18:57, Crizelle Nel crizellenel@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Lars,
The aim of my email was to increase the UI constraint to fit that of the db :0)
While I understand the reasoning behind shortening the DE name field, reducing the db constraint now will have a major impact on existing instances.
We currently have 117 out of 917 DE in the Core Standards system (which has been in Production for just over 2 years now) exceeding 160 characters.This is a stable system that is a replica of a DHIS1.4 system (which is also still in use). We are also in the process of setting up a new CS db with a whole new set of DE (a few thousand) and the DE name length constraint provided to the NDoH was 230. I’m not sure if any of our other DHIS2 dbs have DE names that exceed 160 char as well. Elmarie/Calle? Reducing the number of DE name characters might affect interoperability with DHIS1.4 (which will be around for at least another year or two) and has a db DE name constraint of 230.
P.S there is also a misfit between DE Group and DE Group Set name lengths
–
Regards,
Crizelle Nel
Software Development and Information Systems
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On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:05 PM, Lars Helge Øverland larshelge@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Crizelle,
good point. It’s actually supposed to be 160, I have corrected that now. The misfit between db constraint and ui constraint is unfortunate but its the UI one that’s most reasonable.
The reason why we constrain it is that these kind of very long names really makes the UI unusable - its impossible to read in most analysis modules and you often cannot see the end of the text in the maintenance UI.
160 character is a pretty long name when you think of it. I would say its not good practice to have such long names - better to find a way to reduce the length of the name…
regards,
Lars
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 12:03 PM, Crizelle Nel crizellenel@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
The dataelement table allows for DE names to be up to 230 characters. But when adding a DE name through the UI there is a limitation of 150 characters.
Can someone perhaps explain why this is?
We have a project (Core Standards) where the DE names are in most cases > 150 char. The DE names were imported into the DHIS2 using csv without problems. In fact, everything (custom data entry forms, custom reports, pivot table) works fine and displays the full name. But when editing the name through the UI the changes cannot be saved if the name exceeds 150 char.
Regards,
Crizelle Nel
Software Development and Information Systems
**Health Information Systems Program (HISP) - SA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------**Email: crizelle@hisp.org
Cell: +27 84 580 3342
Fax: 0866 509 502
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Pretoria, 0181, South Africa
E -25.7847787 S 28.2347984
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Calle Hedberg
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