Problem on category/product description - Very BAD problem

[markqtty]

Hello,

i have vm 2.0.12f and joomla 2.5.8 and a big problem
Several time vm, just truncate description of category or product when they are long.

Ad the beginning i thought that was a problem of the table limit (was varchar(2000) or something like that.
But now i have changed the description field type from varchar to longtext (of the description of both category and products), and suddently (apparently with no relationship on what kind of operation are made from the administrative panel) the problem happen again...

This is massive, because i have inserted a lot (and I MEAN A LOT) of content, and they are all broked....

Someone has idea on what happen there?

[markqtty]

It's incredible, i'm checking in database and it's look that the tables are back at their original state:

XXXX_virtuemart_categories_en_gb - category_description   varchar(20000)
XXXX_virtuemart_products_en_gb - product_desc   varchar(18400)

But I HAVE NOT change back this field.

What happen there? vm change suddently the type of the field of the table??

[markqtty]

It's amazing...I had found, any time that i save the configuration of the store, the table will reset to the initial value, without any kind of information or advise by the system. This is incredible.
Bad idea, very bad idea, start this big project with vmstore.

[Milbo]

Hello Markqtty,

the reason is that you stored the config and then the language tables are created/altered. To avoid that it is using varchar is using to write a setting into the config file of vm
virtuemart.cfg. Add there dblayoutstrict=0. Use the tools and use "reset config by file". Be aware your config is set to default then. But then the dblayoutstrict should be set to 0. All description fields are then stored with text instead of varchar.

[markqtty]

Hi,

thank you for your reply but text field it's too small for me. I need longtext.
The only way that i had found in order to archive this is to disable the following line:

if(!class_exists('GenericTableUpdater')) require(JPATH_VM_ADMINISTRATOR . DS . 'helpers' . DS . 'tableupdater.php');
$updater = new GenericTableUpdater();
$result = $updater->createLanguageTables();

on file: ./administrator/components/com_virtuemart/models/config.php starting at row 336

However, don't take it wrong (your work it's always appreciate by me), but probably the meaning of "STABLE" it's pretty different by me and you...

If vm 2.0.12 was a "beta" release could be a great store. But in "stable" meaning...well, i was gentleed up in order to get it work properly...

[Milbo]

It has nothing todo with stable or not.

The point is that we do not consider that someone needs such a long text. We have the solution that people can use text instead of varchar,.. less than 1% of shops needs this. So even for them there is a solution, but only via the config file, which is using another format for descriptions (slower of course).

with text you have already 65,535 bytes, this are imho 32k chars. This is a description which needs some pages. Maybe you do something in your description which should be done via customfiled (you can add with them easily your own scripts for example).