Determining the length of a Value can be done through the Property interface by calling Property.getLength or getLengths (the former for single value properties, the latter for multi-value properties). These length-reporting methods are found on Property and not on Value because determining the length of a value is typically more useful if done before loading the value into local memory as a Value object (of course, whether to do such late-loading is an implementation-level issue, but it is likely to be a common approach). As well, in many implementations determining the length of some values may require access to the Workspace object and in many cases Value objects will not hold such reference (whereas Property objects will). See 6.2.4 Property Read Methods.