Dataport error: The length of the source exceeds the size of the destination buffer.

A college of mine came to me last day with a weird problem. She had build a data port, where the export was going well – but when the data should be imported again, she got the error “The length of the source exceeds the size of the destination buffer.” So what to do?

First we took a closer look on the data port. It is a data port that exports data from several tables (there was about 8 data items). The Report was a copy of an existing one; the existing one was working fine until a table got it keys changed! So my first thought was; that it was the key change that did cause the error. So why not do some testing 🙂

I created a new table, with a key that uses all the space that was allowed. (Max key size is 252 bytes!) Filled it with some test data, build a data port and tried to export the data. Et voilà! The error was reproduced!

So – how do we fix this? The error is not in the export / import itself. It is in the handling of the process bar. Just change ShowStatus in the data port properties to No and the problem is gone. Now you will be able to export / import the data 🙂