Product attribute as textarea .. character limit reached

[jeff1sv]

I have added a tab to the product pages which is used as a product accessories area. For the most part it has worked perfectly, however on some of the main products with a plethora of accessories, I have reached the maximum character limit even with minimizing the input. It is a global attribute using textarea as it's input type. (Trying text field simply stalled everything, so thats no option)

Is there a way to loosen this character limit? As I am not exceeding it by a grand amount but just enough.

-- I have considered making them iframes, but that would be a last resort as the desired affects may not be what I'm looking for and have working currently.

[Benoit Xylo · Accepted solution]

Hi @jeff1sv

I guess it's a database limitation. For the textarea input type the value field is assumed to be of text type, which has a capacity of 64 kB - 1 (or even less when multibyte characters are used). The only solution I can see for your issue is to alter definition of an appropriate column in the database. However, please be warned, I have no any experience if there are any side effects of such an operation, so prior to applying this solution in production, you have to test it very precisely in some sandbox environment.

The SQL statement is as follows:

ALTER TABLE catalog_product_entity_text MODIFY value MEDIUMTEXT;

Such columns allow you to store up to 16 MB - 1 of single-byte characters, but once again I'd like to emphasize very clearly that I have no idea if there's no any impact on the Magento itself, because I've never done it for the product attributes.

Cheers,

BX