Oracle WebCenter Interaction Studio Input Field Black Hole

Studio is a dated product, but one that a lot of WebCenter Interaction customers probably still use.

Recently I was informed about an error in a Record Browser portlet where users where being presented with an error that says "An error occurred processing this Studio request."  The browser title says "Studio: Runtime Error".

The screenshot accompanying our help desk ticket indicated that the user was on Firefox in a Mac environment.  A quick scan of the Studio log file showed the following error:

ERROR [Processor4] GatewayServlet: An error occurred processing this Studio request.
19:29:00 | - Error processing request (handler apprun.doPostEntryForm).
19:29:00 | - Error inserting record in user database Self Assessment Database.
19:29:00 | - [<server>]String or binary data would be truncated.
19:29:00 | java.sql.SQLException: [<server>]String or binary data would be truncated.

In an effort to reproduce the problem I counted out 10 digits (1234567890) and copied and pasted their string (including a space) into the form field in Firefox until I had about 900 characters.  Immediately I received a handled exception error telling me that I'd gone over the character limit and that my input would be truncated (a not so friendly feature).

Next I began reducing the number by 20, and by the time I hit 850 I was able to reproduce the error.  Removing only another 30 characters and the entry submitted without problem.

Inputting the same data into the same field in IE8 caused no such problems, and I even went through the same addition/subtraction process to verify in both rich text and non-rich text fields.

Summary: It seems there is a 50 character blackhole that non-IE users will encounter.
Our solution at this time is going to be avoiding using Studio for those groups that are on Macs (since they don't support IE), and for any groups that have a browser choice (extranet users).