UPDATE: Please review the original post below. I have since tried to recreate the new attribute, making it an Long Description Owner, without interfering with the way that Maximo automatically generates the additional new attribute C_MYATTR_LONGDESCRIPTION, and can confirm that it works as expected, where setting the long description value is persisted to the database when I click Save. This leaves me with the issue that the Long Description can only hold values that are up to 32000 in length - how can I save larger/longer value in the long description?
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I'm having trouble adding a custom attribute to the INVOICE object. I want to make this new attribute, named C_MYATTR, an ALN type of length 100 and make it a Long Description Owner. When I save this change in Database Configuration, it automatically addes another attribute called C_MYATTR_LONGDESCRIPTION - this is a non-persistent attribute that automatically is of type LONGALN and length is 32000. However, I need to be able to put text data that might be longer in the long description. How is this possible?
Here is what I tried:
- After saving the changes in Database Configuration, but before applying the DB configuration changes, I directly updated the MAXATTRIBUTECFG table in the database for the new C_MYATTR_LONGDESCRIPTION attribute, updating the MAXTYPE to 'CLOB' and LENGTH to 999999 (I will actually want to store even larger text data here).
- I went into Admin Mode, and applied the DB Configuration changes - that was successful.
- I added controls on the INVOICE application in the Application Designer screen. I added a new Multi-Line Textbox and configured the attribute to be C_MYATTR, and then set the Lookup to be LONGDESC. Then I saved the changes in Application Designer.
When I opened up an Invoice in the Invoices application, and found that I could populate the new textbox, and I could use the Long Description lookup control and it appears to allow me to enter a Long Description value. However, when I click Save, it blanks out the long description value.
So, here is what I am confused about:
- Why, when I add a new attribute and make it an LD owner, when I save, it auto generates a non-persistent attribute that is limited in type/length? Shouldn't it add the new non-persistent attribute as type CLOB (instead of LONGALN with length 32000, which isn't long enough for my use case)?
- Why does it fail to save the long description value I entered in the LONGDESC lookup of the filed in the Invoices application?
I appreciate any light that can be shed on this. My database is SQL Server, so it should be able to save character data with length much, much longer than 32000 or even 999999, for that matter.