To limit Short description length to 80 characters

[Gopi22]

Hi,

I have got a requirement wherein the short description field in Incident form should be limited to 80 characters.  

User who is typing should be able to type only 80 characters and when he/she types the 81st character, an error message should be displayed and not allow to type more.

Please help me with this. Thanks in advance!!!

Regards,

Gopi

[chris_lo]

Hello Gopi,

The short description field is a field that is inherited from the task table. I would highly recommend not decreasing the max length as I can see that OOB this is set to 160. By decreasing max length this will affect the short description across the task hierarchy (all short description fields on all extended tables of task) and can lead to potential dataloss. We do not ever recommend decreasing max length (special case exception if you have created a new custom column and then want to change it so long as there is no data). If you decide to do so it will be at your own risk.

What you are essentially looking for though would probably be a before update business rule where we check the current character count in that field and if it exceeds 80 then throw a dialog that indicates only 80 characters can be used in the field and then abort the update action.

Chris

Sr. Technical Support Engineer

[jarodm]

I've seen on previous customer instances (I don't have the code anymore) where an onChange Client Script calculated the length of the field, and if it was greater than 80 chars, it would trim it back to the first 80.

Note: This won't work when editing the short_description in List View.

Jarod

[Mwatkins]

Hi Gopi!

I would go with a little of what Chris suggested and a little of what Jarod suggested.

Business Rule

Condition: current.getValue("short_description").length > 80

Script:

current.abortAction(true);

gs.addErrorMessage("The short description field can be no more than 80 characters")

Client Script

Type: onChange

Script:

var sDesc = g_form.getValue("short_description");

if (sDesc.length > 80) {

g_form.showFieldMsg("short_description", "The short description field can be no more than 80 characters", "error");

g_form.setValue("short_description", sDesc.substring(0,79));

}

I haven't tested those scripts, but they should get you 90% there.

[shivanipatel]

Gopikrishnan,

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