CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I want to better identify contacts by assigning tags.
But when doing this I quickly hit the 64 character limit.

I want to track how they heard about my organization e.g. "online : web : yahoo" or "broadcast : radio : wcbs".
With tags like this, it's easy for someone to use the auto-lookup feature in case the list of tags is long e.g. to find all 'radio' tags or all 'broadcast'.
I also want to assign a program of interest at our university. Here's an example long one "Online Graduate Certificate Program in Sleep and Sleep Disorders in Health and Disease".
Actual use cases involve strings that can get up to about 100 characters.
(Really, what I ultimately want I want is long nested/hierarchical tags.)

To get around the 64 character limit on CiviCRM tags, I have done the following:

Run this SQL:
% ALTER TABLE `civicrm_tag` MODIFY `name` VARCHAR(255) NULL DEFAULT NULL COMMENT Name of Tag.';

Modify the data type definition here to make maxlength => 255 instead of 64:
civicrm/CRM/Core/DAO/Tag.php
'name' => array(
                    'name' => 'name',
                    'type' => CRM_Utils_Type::T_STRING,
                    'title' => ts('Name') ,
                    'maxlength' => 255,
                    'size' => CRM_Utils_Type::BIG,
                ) ,

What do you think?
Is a Define for Max Tag Length something that should be added to the civicrm.settings.php file at some point?
I use Drupal 6, is there a way to use Drupal tags instead of CiviCRM tags?

Hi,

Are you aware that tags can be hierarchical? It seems that you are trying to add the name of parents tags into the children tags.

X+

Do you have an example of > 64 char?

(personally never had the issues on one of my install)

Hi,

Part of the problem is that the tags are displayed in the summary, and long tags will make a weird result.

Otherwise, would it make sense to use a shorter name (eg. Online grad Sleep disorders) and put the complete correct name in the description?

X+