Default field mapping for TEXT in MySQL driver

Classic Servoy
1

This may be an education issue, but the default mapping for a TEXT field, when created from within Servoy is varchar.

Users coming from other systems may expect that a text field should handle a bit more than 255 characters and will be confused by the error dialog box.

I might suggest a mapping to TEXT where you have a max of 65535 instead.

I can see arguments for either as the default setting. Education will either come in the form of switching varchars to text (using the Advanced dialog of Data Providers) or that later down the line optimization of the tables will require altering the table from text fields to varchar fields.

From a pure “usability” standpoint it might be better to set the default mapping for text fields to the larger possibilities. Your more advanced users are going to preplan optimization and will use another tool to set fields to the desired type.

TIP: If you are using a Macintosh and OS X to manage your MySQL tables then the best tool I’ve found is free. It’s CocoaMySQL. Find it on VersionTracker.
http://www.versiontracker.com/

2

we can’t use text for default because then you will have text column that are Database CLOBS. And for most database these are very limitted. (no index support, or like searches)

The problem is that with mysql the varchar is very limitted (255). In one of the version comming after 1.2 we will have better support for more database specfiek types.