I have been using the new SMS service via AWS and am pretty happy with it - when sending to 10 or so recipients. But, I need to be able to send to about 500 - 600 at one time. I am getting the following error message: (Invalid parameter: Topic Name) -- I can find no place to do anything with the Topic Name. What to do?

I could, I suppose, change the script to loop through and send individual texts -- but I was hoping that wouldn't be necessary. I will try this and see how long it takes with a list of around 300 or so.

 

 

Edited August 8, 20187 yr by MartieH
added info

Hi Martie,

     Sorry for the delay in response. Have you tried with 300 users at a time? Did you get similar results as the attempt with 500? 

I did try with somewhere around 250 - 300 phone numbers and got the same error message. When I send to less than 20, there is no error. So, I am guessing there is a cut-off somewhere. But, since the number of recipients I need to send messages to varies widely, it appears the only thing to do is to use a looping script. I have written one that is working with a very small number of recipients - I will test it with about 150 in a couple of weeks. Since I don't want to be sending out 'nothing' messages (ie, spam for most) it is a difficult thing to test. My current testing is limited to sending to myself and just a couple of others and putting the phone numbers in multiple times as if they were different numbers.

Is there a way to determine the max number of recipients for any given message?

 

There shouldn't be any hard limit to the amount of recipients. I reviewed the code and we don't explicitly place any kind of limit. I wouldn't think that AWS would place a limit, at least not that low, of the number of recipients for a message. Can you reproduce the error you are getting and send in your logs to [email protected]? Reference this thread so we know what the logs are for.

Apparently, the way you have the sending set up is to insert all the phone numbers in the Topic Name - in researching on the AWS site, I find that there is a constraint of 256 characters in the Topic Name -- so, you can only send to 25 recipients at one time.

I am not working on a server so I don't have any error logs - also, in using the de-bug tool, there are no FMP errors generated - this is a AWS error.

If there is some way to insert the phone numbers into Subscribers rather than the Topic Name, I would imagine that the limit would not exist. But, as far as I can tell, the plug-in is putting the phone numbers into the Topic Name - which has a constraint.

Please let me know if there is something that can be done about this or if I need to continue with a looping script sending to one recipient at a time.

Thank you.

Hi Martie,

     The plugin will write logs regardless of context (FMPro or FMServer). The error you are seeing will still get recorded in our plugin logs as well as with a stack trace so I can see exactly where in the code the error is coming from. Also can you direct me to where you found the information on the 256 character limit?

 

Edit: forgot to add the link for log locations 

AWS Documentation » Amazon SNS » API Reference » Actions » CreateTopic

 

CreateTopic

Creates a topic to which notifications can be published. Users can create at most 100,000 topics. For more information, see http://aws.amazon.com/sns. This action is idempotent, so if the requester already owns a topic with the specified name, that topic's ARN is returned without creating a new topic.

Request Parameters

For information about the parameters that are common to all actions, see Common Parameters.

Name

The name of the topic you want to create.

Constraints: Topic names must be made up of only uppercase and lowercase ASCII letters, numbers, underscores, and hyphens, and must be between 1 and 256 characters long.

Type: String

Required: Yes

 

 

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will try to find the logs you reference.... thanks

I have sent a log to support@360works -- thanks,

Martie

Hi Martie,

I responded to your support ticket with a direct download link for a build I believe should fix the issue. Please let me know if it works and I will post the link for anyone else that may run into this issue.

Got your message - thanks. Will get the new build asap and will test - hopefully late this afternoon - or else first thing tomorrow.

 

thanks so much,

Martie