It looks as though the ‘value’ field for the LBF forms is varchar 255? Is there a way to allow more than 255 characters? Other than changing the database field type? I have a client who wants to put much more data in that in a textarea field.
Apologies I guess I wasn’t clear. The field is indeed rendered as a text field. The problem is that the field in the database holding the value is varchar255, so the value gets truncated at 255 characters. Is there a way around this limitation?
Right. I had considered that, but wanted to see if there was a better way to do this. The 255 character limit was done by design, I suppose? Is there a way around it?
Do you have any suggestions Rod? Is there a better way to make custom forms? I’ve read about the XML form generator but haven’t implemented anything yet. I’ve done a little bit w some custom PHP but would like to avoid that, if possible. Is there one method of creating forms that would be better than another? Better supported? etc.
Suggest you edit the lbf_data table definition using phpmyadmin, and change the data type of the field_value column from “varchar(255)” to “mediumtext”. Of course be sure to make a backup first. I expect that’s all you need to do.
^ Rod’s suggestion above should work fine. I have had to edit the data types for many forms, replacing varchar with mediumtext or text as needed to make things work. The varchar problem comes from a change, I think between MySQL version 4 & version 5, at one point varchar could be up to 65535 characters, then it was restricted to 255.
I was actually just typing a reply when your note came through.
I did just that. I altered the column so that it is now mediumtext as opposed to varchar. My testing last night went without issue, so it appears to have worked and is what I need for this.
Thank you for your suggestion, Rod, and everyone else for taking the time to reply.