CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have to pull in a multiselect field. I am doing it in mysql, partly because of the issue I am mentioning below.

Multiselect fields are stored with a separator, which is a special character (it is hex).  This is the question I got from the person helping me:
 

   I did find that the value is stored in the CIVICRM code at
...civicrm/CRM/Core/BAO/CustomOption.php
 
   Right at the top is a define statement.
 
define( 'CRM_CORE_BAO_CUSTOMOPTION_VALUE_SEPERATOR'," ");
 
   Possibly we could set this as | instead?
 

Would there be any negative impact if I made that change? Actually, I believe if I could do that I could even use the civicrm import function.

Happy dance here.

Not sure what you mean by "showed up again", but there are at least a couple of steps you need to do:

1. make a copy of your current db

2. convert ALL your current custom values (and other places where the separator is used) to use the new separator. (you can probably find all the places its used by doing a search on the code base. So this will involve a series of update statements on the db

3. switch the separator value in the code and do some QA

The code will not function properly if there is the old separator in the db and a new one in the code.

lobo