CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Can I increase the varchar size of the organization name without affecting the current data in the database?
I will like increase the size of my organization name varchar (alter table civicrm_contact modify organization_name varchar(255)).
Please, advise.

Thank you for the info, I will test it before applying the changes on my production site.

It goes without saying that you have to do this again once you upgrade :-)
Alternative is to update the size in the civicrm data definitions (xml files) but even then you have to update those manually with every upgrade.

I stand corrected :-)  and rightly so....lobo strikes again
What you do have to do with each upgrade is check if organization_name is touched by the upgrade.

if the organization_name is touched after upgrade

not sure what you mean by the above, but in general what you are doing is not a particularly 'dangerous' thing to do.

If we decided to alter the organization_name field in the upgrade script, depending on how we altered it, it might cause you to loose some information (say if we decided to make it only 100 characters or something like that).  It seems unlikely (though not impossible) that we would do that.

not sure how many other orgs need an org name longer than what we define by default (which i think is 128) but you could always submit a ticket and patch to core to increase the size of that field for all civicrm users. not sure it that is a sensible idea.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/char.html and http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/char.html have a different limit on the length that is allowed for varchar.  5.1 allows 255 it seems so i don't think we can move it any higher than that until we make mysql 5.5 a requirement.

so it looks like the highest we could push this too for the time being is 255.

to be extra safe and do things properly you might want to create an issue and patch to do this...