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I'm using sandbox (as of June 12, 2008)
I'm adding a Custom Field.  This field has multiple choice options.  I'm entering an option.
For options, the text of each option seems limited to 64 characters.  This is far too small for my choices.  The only thing I can do is put some explanation in the help boxes.  This is not the best presentation I'd like.  Here's an example of real-life use:

Which category do you fall under?
a) Non-Profit Organization (*A non-profit organization is defined as an organization registered with your countries' tax authority as being primarily a non-commercial operation)
This gets cut off: "a) Non-Profit Organization (*A non-profit organization is define"

Makes sense to increase DB column lengths for both of these elements - custom field labels and multiple choice option labels.

I've filed an issue and fixed this in 2.1: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-3217

Columns modified ( to varchar(255) ) are: civicrm_custom_field.label, civicrm_option_value.label

I didn't make any changes other than the schema update and things worked ok - so you can probably "backport" this to 2.0 by running alter table commands on those two columns (of course do this in a test db copy first :-) ).

255 is the maximum length for columns of type "varchar" in MySQL versions 5.0 - 5.0.3. In 5.0.3 this has been increased - but for now we are requiring 5.0+ so I think we need to leave this at 255 for now. Hopefully you can use the "help" column to supplement the text you need.

I've updated CRM-3217 to include increasing col lengths for Price Set titles and Price Field labels.

The alter table statements for all tables are:

ALTER TABLE `civicrm_custom_field` MODIFY `label` VARCHAR(255) NULL DEFAULT NULL COMMENT 'Text for form field label (also friendly name for administering this custom property).';
ALTER TABLE `civicrm_option_value` MODIFY `label` VARCHAR(255) NULL DEFAULT '' COMMENT 'Option string as displayed to users - e.g. the label in an HTML OPTION tag.';
ALTER TABLE `civicrm_price_set` MODIFY `title` VARCHAR(255) NULL DEFAULT NULL COMMENT 'Displayed title for Price Set.';
ALTER TABLE `civicrm_price_set` MODIFY `name` VARCHAR(255) NULL DEFAULT NULL COMMENT 'Variable name/programmatic handle for this set of price fields.';
ALTER TABLE `civicrm_price_field` MODIFY `label` VARCHAR(255) NULL DEFAULT NULL COMMENT 'Text for form field label (also friendly name for administering this field).';
ALTER TABLE `civicrm_price_field` MODIFY `name` VARCHAR(255) NULL DEFAULT NULL COMMENT 'Variable name/programmatic handle for this field.';