IBM Rational DOORS table cell contents size limit

Answer

There is no limit to the size of the contents that can be entered in a single table cell. IBM Rational DOORS table cells are of type Text, and when you export from Microsoft Word to DOORS, Word table cells get mapped to objects of type Text as well. Only String attributes have a size limitation of this kind -- their maximum size is 968 characters.

When you export from Word to DOORS, the data from the Word document gets saved as different DOORS attributes. One of these attributes is of type String, used for Paragraph Style, Object Short Text, Created By, etc. It is possible to include Paragraph Style data when exporting from Word to DOORS. The Paragraph Style attribute is of type String, and thus is subject to the 968 character size limitation. In DOORS 8.x, when you export from Word to DOORS, you get DXL errors to notify you of the truncation as it happens, so you may get multiple errors during the Word export. DOORS 9.x handles this situation more gracefully, so you don't get multiple truncation errors during the export from Word to DOORS.

To avoid getting truncation errors in DOORS 8.x, you need to determine which Word data is getting mapped to a string attribute that is triggering the truncation error. The DXL truncation error will reference the attribute type. Once you know which attribute is getting truncated, you have the option of changing the Word document so that attribute won't exceed the maximum size. If the attribute that triggers the truncation error is Paragraph Style, you can choose to not include paragraph styles during the export from Word to DOORS. If this is not a viable option for you, another way to work around any Paragraph Style size issues is by saving as RTF before exporting to DOORS.