03 July 2018, 21:28

Is there a limit on how big/long Mahara blocks can be? I am using Mahara for my dissertation and creating a block for each chapter (or part of chapter). I don't know whether this applies just to my institution but I have to chop chapters up because of this restriction - This field must be at most 65536 characters long.

What's weird is that one chapter is fine (the one I'm using for the quantitative research), but has loads of tables and I've been using the 2px solid to border those tables effectively. Then it hits the This field must be at most 65536 characters long problem. I've not added any more content; just made the tables bolder.

Is this a usual Mahara issue? I don't want to have to chop this chapter up.

Best,

Kevin

05 July 2018, 10:00

Hi Kevin,

We don't save a text in the database until is has been validated and filtered to be safe for the system. The character limit was set to make this operation more efficient, the longer the text is, the longer it'll take to process it.

The text is saved with html markup, that way we are able to define styles. When you have a table for example with one cell with text 'hello' you'll have:

<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Hello</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

If you add styling to it, it will look like:

<table style="border: 2px solid;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="width: 28.0167px; border: 2px solid;">Hello</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

So you'll be actually adding character to the text just by saying you want a border for the table.

You can see this code in the tool menu item 'source code'.

Cheers,

Cecilia