Cannot handle fields longer than 500,000 characters

Need help Database
1

I receive the following message when attempting to use a workflow to store the text I get back from a web scraper API (which I in turn feed to my LLM).

“Cannot handle fields longer than 500,000 characters. Please use shorter lists, shorter text, upload and replace any inline images with proper urls. Ensure that all text / list of text fields concatenated together add up to a string shorter than the limit, and try again”

Can someone shed some light on the limit here? This has to do about the number of characters being saved in the DB, is that correct? Is this limit arbitrary? Any work arounds?

I did some poking around the forum and this seems like a related thread from back in June 2022: Weird error message: Cannot handle fields longer than 1 million characters

However, I notice that while the thread cites a similar error, the cap is cited as “1 million characters” instead. Did this change from 1 million to 500,000 within the last couple of years? If so, why?

2

I think part of the reason is due to the strain returning these fields puts on bubble shared resources. I’ve heard at least 2 bubble employees reference large, complicated JSON structure data fields as causing stress on resources. I didn’t ask for further details.

3

Thanks. I wonder if anyone can +1 or add additional context to this question.

Is this limitation documented somewhere? When evaluating options and deciding whether or not to use bubble for my project, I didn’t see this restriction noted.

4

Per Bubble the character limit for a value in a database field is far longer. See related discussion. So, either the error you see references a limit other than saving to db or Bubble’s documentation is misaligned.

5

I am encountering a similar issue while creating a JSON to export as CSV. To avoid this error, I am currently processing the data in batches instead of sending it all at once.

6

send bubble support and email and get the answer from ‘the horses mouth’ so to speak.

7

By the way - after contacting bubble and having multiple support agents repro the same issue, this suddenly started working without an issue. They were not able to clarify why this suddenly started working with no app changes, nor did they have any way to reassure me that this wouldn’t stop working some time in the future. Scary stuff when the owners of the platform can’t explain things like this. Yikes…