AARGH What are custom fields good for!?

[GameboyRMH]

- You can't change their size. For example, Text fields are 20 characters long. Too short? Too bad. What contact needs a website more than 20 characters long anyways?

- Relate fields don't work. When you create one, it secretly creates another field that you're supposed to know about using your psychic powers (well I know which PHP to look at to see them but is this expected?). This field stores the ID of the record you're trying to link to. Of course even after you jump through the hoops of relating two modules it doesn't work, because the secret ID field is of type "ID" instead of "varchar," and is again limited to 20 characters in size when it needs to be 36 characters.

- None of the above problems can be corrected manually. Edit the PHPs (in cache/modules/<modulename>) all you want, when you hit Rebuild Relationships it all goes back to the way it was.

- You can't even work around it by editing modules/<modulename>/vardefs.php I don't know if the fields are being created when I hit Repair Database, but it doesn't matter because I can't see them in Studio and therefore can't put them in any of the forms.

Anyone else fed up with this huge glaring problem? Studio has a lot of shortcomings but I can't live with this one. Has any work been done on this in Beta 5 RC? Can I expect any of this fixed in v5 GA?

[kbrill]

- You can't change their size. For example, Text fields are 20 characters long. Too short? Too bad. What contact needs a website more than 20 characters long anyways?

I agree with you but it was pretty easy in 451, just edit the EditView.html file and add a size=50 to the field. A hack but it works. I am asking about 5.0 but I won't expect an answer until middle of next week with the holidays and all.

- Relate fields don't work. When you create one, it secretly creates another field that you're supposed to know about using your psychic powers (well I know which PHP to look at to see them but is this expected?). This field stores the ID of the record you're trying to link to. Of course even after you jump through the hoops of relating two modules it doesn't work, because the secret ID field is of type "ID" instead of "varchar," and is again limited to 20 characters in size when it needs to be 36 characters.

Yes, relate fields are broken in 451h and before. They are fixed in 5.0, I don't know if they will be fixed in 451i or 451j at this point.

- None of the above problems can be corrected manually. Edit the PHPs (in cache/modules/<modulename>) all you want, when you hit Rebuild Relationships it all goes back to the way it was.

- You can't even work around it by editing modules/<modulename>/vardefs.php I don't know if the fields are being created when I hit Repair Database, but it doesn't matter because I can't see them in Studio and therefore can't put them in any of the forms.

Since 451 uses html templates nothing you do the database or vardefs will have any effect, and nothing in cache survives a rebuild. In 451 the table field_meta_data is parsed to write the files in the cache directory. In 451 the only way to affect field size is by editing the modules/MODULE_NAME/EditView.html file. And then delete the EditView.html file from custom/working/modules/MODULE_NAME/ so that your changes will get sucked into studio.

Anyone else fed up with this huge glaring problem? Studio has a lot of shortcomings but I can't live with this one. Has any work been done on this in Beta 5 RC? Can I expect any of this fixed in v5 GA?

Studio has always had it's bugs, and the real hard ones seemed to get pushed off to 5.0 because the whole thing got rewritten and the code could not be ported back to the 451 tree anymore. So things got fixed in 5.0 and didnt get fixed in 451. Not an excuse, thats just what happened. I just went through 5.0 and there is no way that I can see to set the width of a custom field. I posted a message internally to find out whats up with that, seems like an easy and required thing to do. I will post a reponse here when I get an answer.

I have not been able to monitor the help forum as closly as I once did, with the release of 5.0 almost here it has been hectic, so if you posted these concerns/questions there and I missed them I appologize. If you didn't and let yourself get this upset then all I can say is please post questions to the help forum and I will try to get you answers faster than a week (I don't generally even look in this forum but once a week or so). After 5.0 is released and I have some of my projects out of the way I will devote an hour or two every day to monitoring the help forum.