Limitations on length of repeating attributes

[mkolas]

Are there any limitations, hard-coded or suggested, on the length of repeating attributes? I'm working through proofing out a scenario that may have up to 30,000 values on a repeating field. I understand that this will almost certainly break Share, but is this kosher on the backend? If not, what might be good alternative options to capture such data?

[mrogers]

What do you mean by a "repeating attribute"?

[mkolas]

Sorry- a multi-valued attribute.

[mrogers]

Is that a single attribute with thousands of values per node.    Or a single attribute with a few values from a set of thousands?

[mkolas]

A single attribute that may have thousands of values on a particular node.

[mrogers]

I'm not aware of a limit on the number of values for a multi-valued field, but I've never tried 1000.  There is a limit on the size of an individual value.    At 1000 values, you are going to have display issues and may want to display that data in some other way than a simple list.

The other way to model that sort of relationship is via associations.  For example if you have need to know who has read a certain document then that's probably best modeled via assocs rather than a great long multi valued list of the user name of the readers.   And perhaps it never makes sense to print the entire list of readers, although if that is needed its a quick bit of script.