Attribute Oddities

Iva_Ilieva_(CTPAdmin_(Delete)_1417355)

Hi - I'm trying to set up a set of attributes that will allbe organized into a single category. I'm fairly new toLivelink and I'm finding a lot of idiosyncrasies.These consist of both undocumented limitations and behaviorthat is flat out not consistent with the documentation I dohave.Specifics:Docs say that you can't delete an attribute and create a new one with the same name. I can.Docs say that you can't remove an attribute from a categoryand then re-add it. I can.Un-documented issue: The name field is limited to 20 characters. Is this a hard limit or a configurable setting?Other things:I have encountered the 255 character limit on the totalsize of values for a popup field. Is there any work-aroundanyone's used to deal with this?I would also like to support multi-valued attributes. Thisdoesn't seem to be available. Is there a work-around? Myfirst thought has been to use a multi-line field for multi-line attributes and then separate the values by delimiter. After going down this road, I discovered another undocumented issue:You can only have one multi-line attribute per category in"Oracle" (the Livelink error I got specifically mentionedOracle, which is the DB we're using).Any thoughts on any of the above?Thanks in advance.

ray_chance

I don't know all the answers to all your questions, but I can tell you from experience that you don't want to delete an attribute or category, and then recreate it with the same name. If you load any documents using an attribute or category, then delete and recreate the attribute or category, you'll lose the information associated with the documents you put in. And the only way to correct it will be to delete the documents and then put them back in. When creating attributes and categories, you'll have to think about what you want very carefully and set your field lengths on the long side. A careful survey of your users is highly advisable. Once your attribute is created, your editing options are limited, and as the manuals say, you should not delete and recreate with the same name. The result is not pretty. (We use Oracle too, and I would expect you to see the same kinds of problems we did.) We have found that creating a variety of attribute categories offers the users a fair amount of flexibility, and they can set up different folders for different kinds of documents. Good luck with your attributes.