Limitations of Text Fields

Differences between the Digital-Clay field data-type 'Text' and 'Notes':

• Record Size limitation: Each field uses up a certain amount of bytes from the maximum allowed bytes per record. 'Text' uses the same amount as its custom field size (x2 for Unicode), 'Notes' only uses about 12-16 bytes.

• The maximum size for Text is 255 characters. For Notes the maximum size is 65000 characters.

• Although Notes can contain 65000 characters, there is a database limitation when using the fields in all filters and functions except 'Contains': Only the first 255/2000 characters can be used for MDB/SQL Server respectively. This limitation is due to the database, not Digital-Clay, and applies to:
  • 'Equals/Greater/Less Than' filters. This may affect comparisons such as when comparing two notes fields in two tables using automation.
  • All functions like length/left/substring/findstring. E.g. if you apply the function 'length(Notes)' on a field greater than 255/2000 it will return only 255/2000.
  • Concatenation of Notes fields. In other words, whenever Notes fields are used in custom functions, they are truncated.
  • The only exception is the Contains filter. I.e. it is possible to search inside the full content of the Notes fields using a simple filter.

• Notes is displayed as a large 'textarea' component and it supports multiple lines. Text doesn't.