Is there a way to overcome the 160 character length of sms?

[Antonio]

Hi,
usually a user sends information to a server that can be reasonably contained in the 160 character limitation of an sms. While this scenario can be only sometime reductive, most of time, on the other hand, it can be a huge barrier to the information to send back as result of the enquiry posted by the sender.
There could be a bunch of rows obtained with a select on a data table, that need to be packed in an sms back to the caller.
At a first glance I cannot figure out a simple solution to this question, so I am throwing the issue here in the forum to see if anyone has faced it or if there is a way FrontlineSMS can help to solve it, perhaps in next releases.

Thanks for the collaboration

Antonio
length

[kiwanja]

Hi Antonio

Thanks for your message, and welcome to the Forum!

Sadly SMS will always be 160 characters, and there's little we can do about that. FrontlineSMS does support multipart messages, which means you can send up to three SMS's worth as a single message (you do, however, pay the cost of three).

You could, of course, use codes in the message to reduce the number of characters used, or figure out other innovative ways around this, depending on your application.

There may also be programs which compress SMS which run off the phone, but you'd need one running on the send and receive devices and I'm not sure how these would work with FrontlineSMS.

Best of luck in figuring this out - let us know if you come up with anything!

Ken

[Antonio]

Hi Ken,
I was sending a message back from my application with a length greater than 160 Character. The message remained as "pending" on the message list and I couldn't even remove it from the list. I had to close FrontlineSMS and open it again to see the message as "Fail", being so possible to delete it from the list.

Can you please give me some more details about the multipart messages support of FrontlineSMS? Is there a place where it is documented?

Thanks for helping

Antonio

[Alex Anderson]

Hi Antonio,

It sounds like you may be using a phone which does *not* support multipart SMS messages. What phone are you using to send messages from FrontlineSMS? Also, which version of FrontlineSMS are you using?

Cheers,

Alex

[Antonio]

Hi Alex,

I am using a SonyEricsson k850i. FrontlineSMS version is 1.5.8.
If multipart SMS is supported, does it mean that I can output 160*3 characters from an external program to FrontlineSMS and it will be forwarded to the sender (who sent the keyword) in one sms paying the cost of three sms?

I actually sent an SMS directly from the main page of FrontlineSMS, with a length of 160*3 characters, and it was sent as if it were a single SMS (the three message icons clearly indicate when you have fulfilled the first and second message!).

Trying to confirm the first problem I had sending a long SMS, I instead verified now that it is possible to send from my program an SMS longer than 160 character. the message was queued on the message list and sent to the caller (why Frontline takes so long to send an SMS to a user?), who received only one SMS. Did I pay the cost of more than one SMS? What is the maximum number of SMS in a multipart SMS message?

Cheers,

Antonio

[Alex Anderson]

Hi Antonio,

You should be able to send more than 160 characters from an external program.

If your messages contain more than 160 characters (or 70, if you are using Unicode SMS), you will be paying for more than one SMS message.

It will appear to the receiver that they are only getting one message, but it is actually many messages that are joined together by the receiving handset.

Hopes this help explain things.

Alex