What is the best way we can change the length of an attribute?

athati

Hi,

I want to change the length of an attribute of a custom type.
What is the best way practice? I want to enforce it.

Please share your knowledge and experience.

Thanks.

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DCTM_Guru

What version of DA are you using and what errors do you get?

If you need to shorten an attribute, you basically have to do a "swap". This entails:

Create dummy attribute
Copy & truncate the values from the original attribute to dummy attribute
Drop original attribute
Recreate original attribute (with shorter length)
Copy values from dummy attribute back to the recreated attribute
Drop dummy attribute

All comments

DCTM_Guru

You can lengthen the attribute using DA. Goto object types and increase length accordingly.

DA does not support shortening length of attribute.

athati

Thanks Johnny.

So do you mean no way one can shorten the length of an attribute? I tried using DA as well as using Composer, but I could not. I think there should be a way using DQL.

Thanks.

tejrajs

No, shortening the length of String attribute is not supported (it can only be increased).

DCTM_Guru

What version of DA are you using and what errors do you get?

If you need to shorten an attribute, you basically have to do a "swap". This entails:

Create dummy attribute
Copy & truncate the values from the original attribute to dummy attribute
Drop original attribute
Recreate original attribute (with shorter length)
Copy values from dummy attribute back to the recreated attribute
Drop dummy attribute

athati

Thanks Johnny.

We are using DA 6.7. When I triy to shorten the length of the attribute "vendor_nbr" from 12 to 10, I am getting the following error:

Error

We're sorry, there was a problem with your request.

[DM_QUERY_E_MODIFY_ATTR_LEN]error:"ALTER TYPE: The attribute vendor_nbr is longer (12) than the specified length 10."

It looks like it is not easy to shorten the length of an attribute, even with DQL like ALTER....
I understand the "swap" method you proposed. I did this in the past, but I need to play with data.

Thanks.

DCTM_Guru

I thought you had problems lengthening an attribute - hence my question about version of DA. For shortening, only the swap works.