Maximum POI Name Length

I have never had a reboot with my Garmin, but my names are short enough to be contained in the opening window. Not quite sure of the character count.

National Parks, Monuments, Preserves & Historical Parks

That's my longest and no issues when loading through poi loader.
What you see on both my units though, is this
National Parks, Monuments, Preserv...

Most max out around 20 characters

That can't be right, look at the walmart can. and us file

I believe the original post has to do with the length of the string containing the name of an individual point that can be displayed. I took Mr. Coulter's request to be the number of characters displayed and not the number of characters in a file name or even the number of characters the maintainer has for that particular field. As in

You missed a key word on fcoulter quote. You forgot to add "it reboots my GPS" That's the real question here. Maximum POI Name Length? Well it isn't 20, not even about 20. Now I know that my 3590LMT shows the full folder name (3790lmt doesn't) when you enter the category and the you click again to get the actual files which are the shown as i posted, on both. Not one poi that i have used in here has made my units reboot....yet....lol. That National Parks, Monuments, Preserv... is what it can show, there's no room to show more cause it needs to show you the miles and direction also. Regardless, the unit accepted the whole csv file and didn't crash, same as in the walmart file.

No search should cause the GPS to reboot. Is there any chance the .GPI file is corrupt? What is the longest POI name in your new Trailheads file?

I'd be happy to try the file on my nuvi 2595 and see what happens. Click on my Contact tab to reach me via email.

EDIT: The default maximum waypoint length in MapSource is 32 characters. BaseCamp does not appear to have a limit.

It's only a problem when I'm searching within the Trailheads POI file. (You can download it from http://www.poi-factory.com/node/38290 )

If I search for "(TW)", which is my abbreviation for Trailwalker trails, it will display the first bunch of screens, four at a time. Then it hits a name which (I think) is too long, and the unit reboots.

I've been going through the CVS file version of the file and chopping down long file names (LEN() is our friend), and it now makes it through several screens. When I first stated it, it crashed at screen one. As I've trimmed POI names, it's made it further into the file before crashing.

If I just looked at the POI list on the unit, it wouldn't crash. I don't know if this is because the fifty closest POIs had shorter names, or if this is an issue with the search routine.

My current plan is that every night I see if I can crash the unit. If I can, then I download a fresh copy of the POI file, sorted by length of name. I edit the longest names in BaseCamp, then export it again. I then run POI Loader and get them onto my unit.

I repeat the process the following night. If it ever doesn't crash (there are only 50 TW items), I'll assume I've found the longest name that my unit can deal with. I thought I might be able to shortcut this process by asking if there is a magic number.

BTW, I've noticed that even if the name doesn't fully display on the search results screen, the location will be displayed if the search term is in the name. For example, if the POI is named:
Some Random Trailhead (TW)
and I search for "(TW)", it may only display
Some Random Trailhea
This is acceptable behavior as far as I'm concerned.

The full name appears on the next screen if I select it, as well as everything I've added to the Notes tab in BaseCamp. (I think it's the Notes tab; it's whatever tab is second.) Interestingly, the contents of the Notes tab appears twice. The web link for a POI doesn't appear on my unit. I don't know if the POI Loader strips them off.

Notes (or whatever) recognizes at least some HTML code when displayed on my unit. At least I'm using the break command to force a new line.

Your file works flawlessly on my 2595. I've tried duplicating your search methods, and don't encounter any problems.

BaseCamp seems to have the same behavior as MapSource - any data in the Comments (BaseCamp "Notes") field will be duplicated in the Description field of the GPX file. The history goes back to POI Loader 2.5.2 - http://www.poi-factory.com/node/12029#comment-57859
You can use EPE (Extra POI Editor) to remove the duplicate fields.

For HTML coding, the <BR> tag seems to be the Garmin convention for forced line breaks and not the HTML 5 <BR /> notation. See http://www.poi-factory.com/node/23417#comment-142527

I guess my Kenwood(Garmin) is pickier than most units. So I don't feel guity posting the POI file.

Thanks for the other info.