77598 - Company Identifier (UA String) field too narrow

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(CCK Graveyard :: CCK-General, defect)

Description

[blee]

(improvement suggestion from Onedisk feedback)

Company Identifier (UA String) field is limited 10 characters, and cuts off 
anything beyond that. A more accommodating size is desirable.

Comment 1

[Shruti Vasudevan]

Attachment: Patch file to make the size of the company identifier field upto 20 characters

Comment 2

[bobj]

The patch changes the string length from 10 to 20. How was this determined?

For a reference on user-agent strings see:
  http://www.mozilla.org/build/revised-user-agent-strings.html

In some of the examples, the vendor strings exceed 20 characters:
   Mozilla/5.001 (...) Gecko/25250101 MegaCorpBrowser/1.0 (MegaCorp, Inc.)
   Mozilla/9.876 (...) Gecko/25250101 Netscape/5.432b1 (C-MindSpring)

I think we should make the string as long as the UI allows.  If we put the
text field on a separate line, it should allow 40-50 or more characters.

Comment 3

[Shruti Vasudevan]

Attachment: Patch file to accomodate long user agent strings

Comment 4

[Shruti Vasudevan]

Attachment: Patch file to accomodate long user agent strings

Comment 5

[Shruti Vasudevan]

In order to preserve the appearance of the UI, I have made the user agent string 
to be a maximum of 60 characters. I can make it to be much longer than this, but 
then the UI may look cluttered.

Sorry, the above patch accidentally got submitted twice.

Comment 6

[bobj]

Needed for Beta.

Comment 7

[bobj]

r=bobj for patch http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=36597

Comment 8

[Shruti Vasudevan]

Checked in patch. Marking this as fixed.

Comment 9

[Kristi Fredrickson]

Added info on this bug fix to the What's New section of the CCK PR1 Release Notes

Comment 10

[Shruti Vasudevan]

Reopening to determine the exact length of the user agent string.

Comment 11

[Shruti Vasudevan]

Reassigning bug to johng.

Comment 12

[Kristi Fredrickson]

This bug blocks 89481, which is the doc bug regarding specification of UA string 
length

Comment 13

[bobj]

Removed "r=bobj" which was for the previous fix (6/4/2001).

This bug has been reopened to reevaluate the length limitations that may be
imposed by the limitation of the website tracking tools.

Summarizing my understanding from an email thread:
  (1) Some marketing database stores only 50 characters of the user-agent
      string which is useless because even non-customized Netscape or Mozilla
      user-agent strings will be truncated (and it will never store any of the
      customized component).  Further, no one currently uses the user-agent
      strings store in this database.
  (2) Log files store the entire user-agent string, but the reporting
      tool that parses the logs is broken and needs to be fixed.

JohnG, What is the status on this bug?

Comment 14

[Shruti Vasudevan]

The total length of the user agent string should be 13 chars. This includes 3 
chars for "CK-" and 10 chars for the actual string the user enters.

Comment 15

[Shruti Vasudevan]

Attachment: Patch file to limit the user agent string to 10 chars

Comment 16

[Shruti Vasudevan]

Marking fixed

Comment 17

[blee]

Still not very clear what the length of ua string would be. 7/25 bld shows the 
reversion to the original text. Marking this Verified for now.