Maximo provides a facility whereby unlimited text may be associated with an attribute. This text is stored in an additional table called the LONGDESCRIPTION table. The relationship between the long description and the associated object isn’t straightforward. Fortunately, the MBOs provide a facility to hide this complexity and make it easy to set and get such special attributes. Certain attributes of certain objects have been designated as the owners of long descriptions. The ISLDOWNER column in the MAXATTRIBUTE table indicates whether an attribute can have an associated long description. In such cases, the effect is that of a new attribute being added to the object, an attribute whose name is attributename_longdescription. For example, in the WO object there is an attribute called “description”. This is an owner of a long description, so an attribute called description_longdescription is available for use. The setValue() and getString() methods, among others, may be used to alter or retrieve the value of the attribute. It is not currently possible to use the QBE mechanism on a long description.

mbo.setValue("description_ longdescription", "This sentence is a long description.") logger.debug(mbo.getString("description_ longdescription"))

It should be noted that in performance terms it is more expensive to retrieve a long description than a normal attribute.