Error messages: getting around 70-char limit

Hi all - we just discovered recently that IDS (v10.UC4) truncates user error messages at 70 characters when an exception is generated within a stored procedure. Since I have stored procedures that need to return longer error messages in some situations, what I was thinking of doing was embedding an ID in the error string and stuffing the complete error text into a row in another table (table that just holds error messages). This isn't too terribly difficult to do, but it does seem just a little bit awkward. So before heading down that path, has anyone else come up with a slick system for this already? Is there a way to do it in memory perhaps w/o writing to a table? Thanks, - Matt