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About field sizes and supported characters

The interface and the software behind it all support UTF-8, which generally means all the million plus characters used around the world - if you can type it on your keyboard you should be ok.

This character set applies to almost all attribute data:

Yes: email addresses, custom attribute names, targets, data, and any other customisable field - e.g. email templates.

No: username (English characters only, sorry)

If you are uploading or mapping data to fields that already exist in OpenAthens, you will want to make sure your data fits. The targets and names are fixed for the core attributes.

Bulk uploads will reject fields that are too large and mapped attributes will be truncated to fit. 

We've been around for a long time, so some of the fields are smaller than you might expect. These are the maximum field sizes.

Core attributes

Username: 20 (including prefix)

Password: 100

First name: 50

Last name: 50

Email: 200

Title: 100

Department: 100

Position: 50

Telephone fields: 20

Staff/student number: 20

Postal address: 200

Institution: 100

Custom attributes

Text attributes - 1024

Email attributes - 200

Choices - 255

Dates - must be between 1 Jan 1900 and 6 June 2079.

Permission sets

Description: 100

Name: 20

Notes: 200

Resources, including custom

Title:100

Description: 2000

URLs: 512

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