Data field length

Michael

It's my understanding that the maximum length for any custom text field in Convio is 255 bytes. Is this true? Is there any way, perhaps as a special custom field, a longer one could be created? In Oracle, VARCHAR is actually deprecated, so the convio docs that use that term are... out of date. Anyway, the max length of a VARCHAR2 field starting back in Oracle 8 is 4000 bytes. 255 is like.... MS Access sized

As and aside, I don't suppose there's a possibility of creating an XMLTYPE field up as a member field (or maybe just a CLOB field, which is all the XML field really is anyway)? That's a 4GB field and would allow pretty much any sort of non-convio-specific custom data be stored in a constituent's record. I'm thinking things like website page tags for OUR non-convio-driven website, data for our Power Circles app, also not on a Convio-hosted site, maybe some other site useage data. I don't know, but there are whole hosts of things one could think up. A field that can have 4GB of data in it per record would allow us to use the API and Convio in very flexible ways....

(Note: I do understand the issues around field length and performance and sizing a data field no longer than it really needs to be, mostly my question is if we wanted, can we have a field or fields super-sized somehow)