"Response too long" error message

[tsauerwein]

I am referring to the "Response too long" error message, which is bugging quite a few people (me included). This is the piece of code that is raising the error:

If (CLng(resultLength) > 65535) Then
        MsgBox "Error: Response too long." + Chr(10) + Chr(10) + "Please don't cite so many references in one citation."
End If

https://github.com/Mendeley/openoffice-plugin/blob/master/src/mendeleyMain.vb#L178

In the corresponding support ticket, a Mendeley employee stated that this check is necessary because LibreOffice has a limit on the number of characters that can be stored in a field.

When he talks about "fields", I guess he means the fields that are created for every citation (or "citation-cluster"). So the above limit check should be called separately for every citation field. As it turns out, the data for ALL citation fields is requested at once from the Mendeley API (when MendeleyDesktopAPI.formatCitationsAndBibliography() is called). Because of that, the above if-statement doesn't check if single fields exceed the limit but checks whether all fields together would have more than 65535 characters. Which wouldn't make sense...

This is what I found out after some quick debugging (btw. thanks for the build script, which made it easy to get started!). I haven't fully grasped the whole code and I am not sure what would be the right fix. But maybe this hint helps.

[robertknight]

Hello,

Because of that, the above if-statement doesn't check if single fields exceed the limit but checks
whether all fields together would have more than 65535 characters. Which wouldn't make sense...

That does look like a mistake, possibly a result of changes after that check was originally introduced. As far as I know the 65K limit only applied to individual fields, which is what should be checked.

I would suggest:

1. We should check whether the 65K limit still applies or not - it should be possible to do this manually by trying to paste a piece of text larger than this into a field code and seeing whether it gets cut off.

2. If the limit still applies, the check can be moved to line 520 where the validity of the returned field code is checked.

[tsauerwein]

Hi Robert, thanks for the fast reply! It would be great if this issue gets fixed.

The 65535 character limit seems to be problem of the String type in OpenOffice VBA:
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/BASIC_Guide/Strings