config groups in admin console – max char limit

[codingadvocate]

I normally use the graphical admin-console utility to setup new installations, and I’ve noticed a Windows-specific issue on large cut/pastes in Windows when modifying the config groups. I wanted to give a heads up/work-around for others hitting the issue… but first some background.

Customers don’t always provide vanilla OS builds for the template job to automatically profile what to ignore. I’m left discovering a current OS provisioned for some app team, and then creating a clean config group version by pulling out some of the data to ignore and making the OS or hardware versions less specific. So I open the admin-console, click on the Platform-Configuration-ConfigGroups selection in the ribbon, and select my config group from the list. In the right pane, I select all (Ctrl-A) to get a copy of that version and then click the button to ‘Insert’ a new group. Now I paste in (Ctrl-V) the previous selection to baseline before edit. Full stop, because right here – during the paste operation – is where you may hit the problem with character limit.

It’s not a limitation with the wx library, rather a platform difference. On Windows, there’s an issue with pasting in anything more than 32K characters at a time. Because the admin-console uses a wx.TextCtrl window for this data, it can hold much more; however, a serialized paste breaks at 32K. So if you have more than 32,000 characters (as a point of comparison, Red Hat EL builds usually have closer to 64K), you will notice a partial paste just happened.

Here’s a simple work around:
Click at the end of the partial paste, and paste again (Ctrl-V). Now you will have 2 partial pastes in a window buffer of 64K now. So select all (Ctrl-A), which consists of two bad sets, and overwrite with yet another paste. Now you see the full data set.

FYI.

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