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Change Text field to TextArea

Francesca Shiekh

I have a request from my users to change a Text field to a Text Area.

This is a custom field in a custom module, so no concerns about "messing up" the out of the box.

I know I can't do this in Studio, and the sane thing to do would be create a new field and copy the data from one to the other and make the users change any reports, dashboards, filters etc.. they may have.

But users are lazy... and I'm a little crazy...

Are there any counter-indications to trying to do this by manipulating the vardefs for that custom field and modifying the DB field from varchar(255) to text? (we are on-site and can do crazy things at times... not that we should...)

thanks,
FrancescaS

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  • +1

    No problem if you are on-site.

    When you run an SQL like

       ALTER TABLE mytable MODIFY COLUMN mytext TEXT ;

    the current content of the column will be converted to text.

    Even in the cloud you could use the extension framework to "overwrite" the datatype of the column by a vardef extension (if you know it will work on-site) and the data will be copied over.

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  • +1

    No problem if you are on-site.

    When you run an SQL like

       ALTER TABLE mytable MODIFY COLUMN mytext TEXT ;

    the current content of the column will be converted to text.

    Even in the cloud you could use the extension framework to "overwrite" the datatype of the column by a vardef extension (if you know it will work on-site) and the data will be copied over.

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