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Hi all, does EE truncate text at roughly 60K characters?

I have a page of content (which I don’t want to break into multiple pages) that has about 200K of text—how do I get that up?

Isn’t the container just an arbitrarily sized text blob?

Thanks,  -Scott

It’s a limitation of MySQL, or more precisely, the used field type. You’ll have to change the field type from TEXT to MEDIUMTEXT. See this thread for reference, this has come up a number of times before.

Thanks, bummer—apart from changing the database itself, is there any other way to add a larger chunk of text to a page? (ie, what if somebody can’t change the database itself)

You could use more than one custom field, but I think changing the field type would be the way to go. Even though you should make a backup first, it’s not particularly difficult.

Thanks—fwiw, the problem with changing the database is that we’ve been trying to stick to a vanilla install (keeping all our changes as stuff *within* the database, rather than to the database or application itself).

Presumably, this is beneficial when it comes to upgrades and/or migrating to another server—ie, do you know if upgrades will safely “respect” that this column now has a new size? (one concern is that the column might later somehow revert to the smaller default size—perhaps along with an upgrade—and thereby truncate our data with it)

btw, is there a performance downside to the larger column? If not, seems like EE might consider making that a system-wide change…

I understand why you are hesitant to “hack”, it makes upgrading much more difficult. This is not quite true for changing a field type in the database though, which you’d only do once. Updates should not touch this field, certainly not shrink it: it’s “TEXT” now (65k characters), “TINYTEXT” would only allow 256 which is clearly too little.

There are space and performance considerations as well, yes, which is why this might not become standard for all fields.