The following details the attribute property MaxLength for common business objects.
Because the architecture BO does not have the notion of BO size, a characteristic strongly exhibited in all HL7 data elements instead of just data element of primitive type, the notion of Maximum Length can't be conveyed in the traditional manner through the MaxLength BO attributes property. This attribute property is not used in BOs of all scopes of HL7 data element representation in order to achieve uniformity in the representation of Maximum Length of HL7 data element. Instead, the notion of Maximum Length of HL7 data element is conveyed through the AppSpecificInfo. Since this version of the data handler does not support validation, Maxlength as an AppSpecificInfo property does not take place in any part of the BO of this release.
Since the MaxLength can be a decisive factor on whether BOs of certain size can be stored in communication channels for certain brokers, it is still important to set the correct value to this attribute property. If it is not mentioned, the default value of this attribute property is 255 for all primitive attributes.