Maximum custom columns when customizing views

[stifani]

hello,

how i can insert more than 30 columns in a view ?

i found that inserting the column n.31 something strange is shown in that column

tnx



EDIT: 30 on 31

EDIT2: What's the maximum string length per column ?

[milo1012]

Indeed, it seems that for more than 30 or so columns the behavior is quite buggy!
I get things like x\x\x filled in the first column and most others getting deleted, as soon as I use that huge amount of columns.

But seriously, you'll hardly get that much columns "usable" due to limited space.
Still, congratulations for discovering that behavior!

AFAIK the maximum text string length is 2047 ANSI or 1023 Unicode characters, simply because a content plugin can't return a longer string.

[MVV]

There is an INI line length limit, and headers/contents for all columns are stored in a single INI key. So the more columns you have, the less header/contents length per column you get. But if you can make headers shorter, it may be hard to do the same with contents because it depends on plugin/field names.

[milo1012]

Yes, I knew there was a limit, but I didn't expect it to be that short (512 characters?).

That's another reason why I never use Write/GetPrivateProfileString, but a custom lib instead.
Anyway, TC should check for exceeding that limit and truncate it or output a warning message IMO.

[MVV]

BTW, GetPrivateProfileString support much larger strings, limit is set by caller.

[petermad]

TC doesn't promise more than 29 custom columns - From the help file:

Configuration - Custom columns

Custom column configurations:
Lists all configured custom columns views. A maximum of 29 views can be configured. You can simply sort them with drag&drop.

I complained about this and the lack of warning when you exeed the number (which you, depending on the string sizes, might be lucky to exeed by a few) all the way back in 2004 in the private beta test forum.

Back then Ghisler answered this to the request for a warning dialog:

I will consider it, but I hate adding another translation string for such a rare case...

[milo1012]

From my understanding:

There are 29 possible custom column views

Means we have 29 possible configurations (=custom columns), that's why we have Configure view Nr: shown,
but that doesn't mean we're limited to 29 individual Fields in that particular custom column.

I was able to manually put 34 fields in my column, but only by manually editing the INI file.
As soon as I want to add that many within the dialog, that mentioned buggy behavior shows.

insert more than 30 columns in a view

I'm pretty sure that is what the OP meant: columns=fields for that particular view.