Desktop plug-in for Windows fails on large uploads

At one of my customers we ran into the problem that users were not able to upload files larger than 50MB within the HCL Connections Desktop plug-in for Windows but were able to upload files of up to 1GB (server setting) in the browser. The error users got in the desktop connector was “Server returned bad request (400)” when uploading these larger files. I will post the solution they found (and that I can’t seem to find online) here for others to use in case they run into similar problems.

Solution:

It is possible to change the size at which the Plug-in begins using the large file upload functionality. This can be overridden using a policy set in the registry.

Add a string key in the policies section: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\IBM\Social Connectors\Settings

with the name: LargeFileSize

The value is in megabytes and the default is 100MB. Set it to the size your system allows, for instance: 1024

The solution was tested and works for 64-bit systems.

Note: For 32-bit Windows you could try using: KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\IBM\Social Connectors\Settings instead but this wasn’t tested. If you do, feel free to comment below if that worked.

2 thoughts on “Desktop plug-in for Windows fails on large uploads

  1. It’s interesting that we had the same issue, but solved it by upgrading the Desktop Connector from march 2020 to the latest July 2020 release. I assumed that the new version created those key, but I looked into my registry and there is no key called LargeFileSize.The limit was also different to me, we got that error for files larger than 100MB. This was verified with test files in 1MB steps.

    1. Yes, I had it both in the older and newer version of the Desktop Connector. To be honest I found this a confusing problem all along. At another customer we never engaged this problem at all and I’m not sure what they did differently. But as I figured others might be having similar challenges it wouldn’t hurt to share !

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