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remove sms character limit

Submitted by Matt Young on Sun, 16/04/2017 - 21:04
in

In 1.9.1 is it possible to remove the 160 character limit?

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Re: remove sms character limit

Submitted by Ben_Charlton on Wed, 19/04/2017 - 09:06.

SMS's are hard limited to 160 characters or less by telcos.  Yes some phones will send messages longer...but it does so by splitting them at the senders end and then hopefully the recieving phone will stitch them...BUT thats very phone dependent.

SMS is designed as a quick message blast not really as a long form communication tool.

I dont see any point in removing the limit...all it will achieve is half of many messages not being sent. 

 

https://www.clickatell.com/faqs/answer/what-is-the-maximum-length-of-an-...

 

Regards
 
Ben 
OpenVPMS Installer and Helper 
Ph: +61423044823 
Email: info[at]charltonit.com[dot]au

Re: remove sms character limit

Submitted by Matt Young on Wed, 19/04/2017 - 10:50.

I disagree, sometimes you just can't fit what you need to say in 160 characters, especially when you get someone with a long pet's name and/or surname. I guess I don't mean to remove the limit but to aloow an increased limit using concatenation.

Concatenation works on all modern handsets and is supported in the clickatel api (https://archive.clickatell.com/developers/api-docs/overview-of-api-features/) so I don't see why it shouldn't be configurable to allow it. Of course there is the increased cost (as you would be potentially sending 2 SMSes) but that wouldn't bother me. 

https://www.clickatell.com/articles/technology/the-uncomplicated-guide-to-concatenated-sms/

I'm not sure why you say it would result in "half of many messages not being sent" Ben?

Re: remove sms character limit

Submitted by tanderson on Mon, 24/04/2017 - 15:48.

It could be done, but it is dependent on the SMS gateway. There would need to be a setting on the entity.SMSConfigEmail* archetypes indicating how many message parts are allowed.

The SMS editor should also be updated to indicate the number of available characters in the current part.

As a side issue, the SMS editor doesn't make any distinction between characters > 7 bits, which means that any unicode character > 127 is counted incorrectly. If such a character is present in the SMS, the number of characters available should halve.

 

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