CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

There's a pretty troublesome bug in 3.3.3 if you create an AdvSelect as a Custom Data field and give it a very long list of options.

Because multi-select uses a simple text field with all the applied values from the multi-select concatenated together with unprintable characters, and because AdvSelect fields have a default length of 255 characters, if your selected options from the list totals more than 255 characters, then it will silently be truncated.

Adding more values to a form with one of these "maxed-out" lists results in no addition being saved, and no error reported.

I was able to fix my own issue by modifying the civicrm_custom_field record for my AdvSelect data element and entering a length of 1024 (plenty for my purposes).  Because that record is only metadata, and is not the actual data field itself, I also had to modify the table the values are stored in "civicrm_values_whatever" where "whatever" is the name of the group your field is in.  I had to change the length of the varchar field to 1024.

This is, of course, only a hack that makes it work.  The problem still exists.  Just thought someone would like to know if it hasn't already been reported.

Another side note:  Views2 integration is severely broken for multi-selects in CiviCRM as regards filters.  Don't use them if you intend to do any significant filtering.  The "contatenate with unprintable characters" method does not play well in Views2 filters.

i've run into this as well. threw me off for a bit.

i think the vast majority of users give no thought to the database field length. only technical users would even give consideration to it. so if its possible to have the field length expand to meet the changing use of the data, that would be ideal. and we could probably remove the option altogether. just a hunch, but i suspect that option was more important back in the pre v2.0 days when all custom field values were stored in a single table, rather than the current data model, which is much more extendable.