Support Article
Curly apostrophe in text causes commit error
SA-23754
Summary
User is often copying text from MS Word documents into work objects in Pega. When there is a curly apostrophe in a long string, an error occurs when saving the work object.
Error Messages
pyCommitError:** ** ORA-12899: value too large for column "PEGADATA"."WORK"."PROPERTY" (actual: 257, maximum: 255)
Steps to Reproduce
1. Create a text property of length 255.
2. Enter a value for that property which is 255 characters long, with special characters such as curly apostrophes.
3. Observe ORA-12899 error.
Root Cause
Oracle stores these types of characters as multi-byte characters, causing the property to be longer than the field in Oracle despite being under the character limit in Pega.Resolution
There are Oracle settings available for Unicode character sets to declare a column length in characters rather than bytes.
Either by changing the (database-wide) parameter NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS, or by using the CHAR keyword when declaring a column length (for example: varchar2(255 CHAR) rather than varchar2(255), which would result in a column that holds 255 characters rather than 255 bytes).
Either of the above mentioned settings addresses this issue.
Published May 27, 2016 - Updated October 8, 2020
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