BAQ to find Comments that were truncated to 1,000 characters by Epicor's latest upgrade error

Kinetic ERP
1

I have worked with a couple customers that were affected by the recent revision change of Comment fields being restricted to 1,000 characters.
I wrote a BAQ that will help you find any comment field after Dec. 21st that was limited to 1,000 characters (including line returns)

This is looking for Quote and Order header and line Comments and JobHead and Job Assy comments too.

commentfields.baq (13.2 KB)

1 Like
2

Wait, what? They didn’t do this to BAQ comments, did they? (I don’t even know the limit today actually. But I’d hate to lose my documentation.)

[Edit]

Oh I see.

I am on this site most every day and somehow I missed this (1,100 other people did not miss it lol.)

So they are working on it, eh?

3

@JasonMcD the query is to find Orders, Quotes, or Jobs affected by Epicor lasted upgrade.
I just checked the Query description and comment fields in Kinetic and they will hold x(10000) characters.

I saw Epicor said they would fix it, but another that stated it was working as designed!

I’ll add - there are 1900+ fields that are set as x(1000) - so what could go wrong?

At least they didn’t change the actual table scheme so prior long comments were not affected. (unless you try to edit them).

1 Like
4

Thank you, Bruce.

I think I read your post because the title was in words and not code. :rofl:

5

I didn’t find any long comments when I ran your BAQ, but just doing a search of JobOper.CommentText shows I have lots of jobs with way over 1000 characters in the op comment field. We store lots of operation specifics in the comment text.

Do I need to be digging into this further? I don’t quite understand what happened from that other post. I don’t see my comments having been truncated anywhere. Records with exactly 1000 characters don’t appear to have been truncated. What should I be looking out for?

6

@NateS
Epicor did an upgrade this last weekend that limited any field that had a default format of X(1000) to be limited to 1,000.
However, even though the field showed a format of X(1000), it treated it like X(MAX).
Here’s the complete thread on this issue.

7

So, since I still have fields over 1000, I shouldn’t have to worry?

8

This change affected Cloud customers because it was automatically pushed out to them.
For on premise when you upgrade to 2024.2.?? - this could affect you.

Look at the beginning of this thread for the fix to prevent an issue.

9

We are cloud DT. I don’t think this impacted us somehow. I see the change to Application Studio called out in that other thread. But I am sure we never did any of this.
Edit: just requested a snapshot to pilot in case a future update borks the comment fields.

10

To be fair - Epicor’s up a really nasty creek on comment fields. NVARCHAR(MAX) for an arbitrary comment string is a bonkers thing to have frolicking around in an onsite database where a single bad actor wiping out all the storage doesn’t affect unrelated businesses. For SaaS environments, this absolutely has to change and I’d be planning on that happening.

I agree that a 1KB limit is overkill though, that’s a reasonable amount for someone to type. Maybe 10KB, that’s about 6-10 minutes of reading, that’s where I’d start raising an eyebrow at folks and suggesting that perhaps this isn’t the right place to paste the text of every email related to the subject.

4 Likes
11

:rofl: So true!