SMS ERROR sending multiple recipients

[MartieH]

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, 2018 by MartieH
added info

[ryan360Works]

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? 

[MartieH]

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?

 

[ryan360Works]

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.

[MartieH]

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.

[ryan360Works]

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 

[MartieH]

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

[ryan360Works]

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.

[MartieH]

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