How do you render a long string (>2,047 characters) in a visualization?
Currently, the string is clipped after 2,047 characters and I cannot view the whole text.
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Hi,
Thank you for reaching out. String are currently limited to this size. What you will need to do is split the string into segments prior to loading into QuickSight and use multiple fields so that the string is not truncated in the display. We’ll definitely look at supporting longer string lengths in the future.
Best,
Sean
Can the multiple fields be concatenated to render as a single display field?
Our team uses Quicksight to troubleshoot customer issues. And it’s very difficult for them to stitch the data together.
Hi @rishis -
You can do this with the Concat - Amazon QuickSight function.
A tip for the word wrapping, create a calculated field with a placeholder of “temp”, add to visual and set the height/width of the cell, then add the concat function to the calculated field.
Example:
@robdhondt thanks for your reply. Your suggestion seems to work well where the dataset is a file (e.g. CSV) and I was able to reproduce it. However, it doesn’t seem to work for when the dataset is PostgreSQL (without SPICE) – the text in the visual is clipped after 2,047 characters even though the length of the concat calculated field is greater. See screenshot (sorry I can’t share a full screenshot because it’s sensitive data).
Hi @rishis -
You’re right the visual limitation is dependent on the data source. I was able to reproduce what you are experiencing. It’s great you are bringing up this use case here.
Here’s a workaround, that may work for your use case.
Step 1 - Use the Replace - Amazon QuickSight function to create calculated fields for your split text blurb columns.
Step 2 - Create an Insight and add your split fields as categories.
Step 3 - Custom narrative and add 2 “bottom ranked” computations. Note: I changed the index to [0] because I will always be showing 1 record at a time.
Step 4 - Customize computation blocks formatting.
Step 5 - Add a filter action to allow your users to see the text blob for each record.
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Hi @robdhondt - good to know it is a known limitation. I have experimented with using Insight, however, the trouble is only a maximum of 5 “categories” are being assigned. And in some cases, the text is more than 5 * 2047 in length.
@rishis -
That is an incredible amount of text to render in a dashboard. You could try using multiple Insights, but it sounds like you’ve experimented with that.
It sounds like you may have a hard requirement to keep this entirely within QuickSight. If you don’t I would consider truncating the text field (less than 2047 characters) and then providing a hyperlink to the full text. IMO - this also makes for a better user experience.
@robdhondt - it is a lot of text. The use-case is for our support team to troubleshoot api network activity which has large payloads. In addition to Quicksight being our business intelligence tool, it serves as a troubleshooting tool that keeps data within the AWS ecosystem.
@robdhondt – I am am curious if AWS has made progress on this issue?
@rishis
Thank you sharing your detailed requirements and feedback. I will submit this as a feature request. Please share your company name along with your email id with me privately.
Thank you,
Deepak
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Hi, @rishis. Did the responses from @robdhondt and @DeepakS answer your question? I am marking this reply as, “Solution,” but let us know if this is not resolved. Thanks for posting your questions on the QuickSight Community Q&A Forum!
Hi @robdhondt . Can you please elaborate a bit on this? I am currently trying to display a large set of characters and my dataset is a CSV File. I am new to Quicksight and I am not able to duplicate your results. Any insight will be helpful.
Thanks
Hello there,
Was there any solution to String character limit? Curious to know if this was resolved in later releases?
-Naveen
Hi
I believe there is no solution as of now.
Similar to the troubleshooting use case from previous posters, we use the dashboard to display log messages that could get quite long (more than 27000 characters). When experimenting with pre-processing the log message string data into substrings less than 2047 characters, loading the data into QuickSight and then concatenating the substrings to reconstruct the original log messages, I encountered another character limit of 8188 for the calculated field for the string concatenation. The text strings only display up to 8188 characters (e.g. in a table visualization). Performing search operations on the log messages also revealed that the scope of the search is only limited to the first 8188 characters, and when exporting the table data as Excel from the dashboard, the string values remain truncated at 8188 characters, which means any string data beyond 8188 characters are really “lost”…?