Maximo

Hi Everyone, Good day! 

We are using IBM Maximo Asset Management 7.6.1.2 and the client would like to customize the Inspection form text response field to be able to handle 4000 characters instead of default limited size. 

I would like to check if you have also encountered this requirement. Can you please share the steps on how you implemented it? Thank you!

I would start questioning - why? What is the reason, where that long response is used etc?

Maybe that response is possible to split in some responses, which can also be later analysed, sorted, filtered etc. 

I have had similar cases (not with inspection forms) where later that long text is not used or not filled. Especially from some mobile device, it is not easy to write that amount of text. Yes, there is possibilities for text to speech.

But is it realy needed?

If it is really needed, most probably relevant DB filed needs to be extended, also something for inspection forms could be needed to changed in representation files, I'm afraid.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my query. I appreciate the input

I would suggest not to extend the text response. The inspection application was never intended to keep such long answers. To me it looks more to add some comments like we do in the work log on the related work order. Another suggestion is to add such long answers as a document link to the associated work order. Unless you have speech to text enabled (and answer a text response via speech) it doesn't benefit the end user (= technician or inspector) to respond with such long answers using a mobile device (very UI unfriendly).

Hi Mary,

Whilst I would not necessarily recommend extending the inspection form text response field, I have had the use case where it was required to increase the length to 3000. This was because asking the user to put the information into a work log would have broken the flow of the form (which was quite long) and by making the field mandatory, we were guaranteed that the user would put some information into it. In our use case, all of the users required to complete this form are using laptops and are therefore able to add a significant amount of text quite easily. If they were using a tablet or phone type device, asking for a lot of text would be suboptimal and frustrating for the user, so I would recommend rephrasing the question to get them to pick the answer from a list or even several questions that would cover the required response...

If you wish to allow more text in the response, you will need to increase the TXTRESPONSE field of the INSPFIELDRESULT object from 250 to your desired length. Please keep in mind that increasing the length of this field will also increase the amount of database storage allocated/required. So, if you increase it to 4000, every response will be allocated that amount of storage in the database which may introduce other issues for you.

Many thanks. 

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Chris Price
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