PeopleSoft Payroll Interface Field length

Question

I have added a field to a Payroll Interface definition. I am using the delivered field TEXT254. The field where you define the length of the field in bytes (field definition table) is three characters, so it would appear that you can define the length as 999 bytes. The PI process fails when I set the length to 999 bytes, until I lowered it to 150 bytes. I am experimenting, with it, slowly increasing the value I'm wondering if anyone knows what the limit really is? Our PI takes 3 hours to run, so experimenting takes a long time.

edit - I cut down the runtime by getting rid of all but one company. The largest byte size that I seem to be able to get to run is 240. I did some research, and it looks like when you build your tables, Oracle will set the field to VARCHAR2(n*3) where n is the size of the field specified in AppDesigner. Sure enough, the script generated by the Project...Build sets my field to VARCHAR2(762).

Answer 1

This is what I found - the data that the PI exports is pretty much unlimited - in the PI_PARTIC_EXPT table, the EXPORT_ROW field is 250 characters. If the row you're exporting exceeds this, a new row is inserted with a new sequence number (export_seq), and the data is continued in the EXPORT_ROW field in this new row.

There is,however, a limit to an idividual field that the PI can handle, and that is 240 characters, so once I limited the field to 240 characters all was well.