[Bioperl-l] description length

[Hilmar Lapp]

In Bio::DescribableI we say

       description

        Title   : description
        Usage   : $string    = $obj->description()
        Function: A text string suitable for displaying to the user a
                  description. This string is likely to have spaces, but
                  should not have any newlines or formatting - just plain
                  text. The string should not be greater than 255 
characters
                  and clients can feel justified at truncating strings at 
255
                  characters for the purposes of display
        Returns : A scalar

Bio::PrimarySeq::desc is mapped to this. However, some descriptions in 
Swissprot are longer than 255 chars. (I'm realizing this while being 
thrown out by Oracle while loading swissprot/bioperl-db; MySQL just 
silently truncated it.)

Are we happy with this possible truncation (i.e., strict DescribableI
enforcement)? I'll open up the column width (becomes a TEXT in MySQL) in
biosql; my point is rather to point out that the above definition doesn't
play well with factual data when you want to round-trip and have an
enforcing implementation (could be your schema) somewhere in the chain.

What would the problem with relaxing the field width or removing it 
entirely?


	-hilmar
-- 
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Hilmar Lapp                            email: lapp@gnf.org
GNF, San Diego, Ca. 92121              phone: +1-858-812-1757
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