Add VARCHAR

[Former user]

Originally reported on Google Code with ID 160

I would like to be able to choose 'VARCHAR' as data type and specify a length.

Reported by swenkooij on 2012-11-26 18:04:39

[Christopher Kramer]

Well, the easy answer is: Use another DBMS then ;-)

SQLite does not use this information if you specify it. You can specify it, but it
will simply be ignored. From http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q9 :

SQLite does not enforce the length of a VARCHAR. You can declare a VARCHAR(10) and
SQLite will be happy to let you put 500 characters in it. And it will keep all 500
characters intact - it never truncates.

So I would say it does not make any sense to specify a field VARCHAR(10). This will
only create the wrong impression that the string cannot be longer.

In fact there usually is a maximum length of one billion for any TEXT or BLOB field
specified by a preprocessor macro (at compile time!):
http://www.sqlite.org/limits.html#max_length

To ensure that a string cannot be larger, you can use a CHECK constraint (which will
raise a constraint violataion if the length is too large - not truncate it!) or use
a trigger.

So these remarks to help you with SQLite. I don't see anything phpLiteAdmin should
implement in this regard.
Only thing I could image would be to implicitely create a trigger checking the length
if somebody created a VARCHAR of a given length. But users who know SQLite would expect
that the specified length is weak, which would be wrong then.

Reported by crazy4chrissi on 2012-11-26 19:47:50

[Christopher Kramer]

Ah, and if you follow the SQLite logic: Don't consider it a bug - it's a feature!
You'll never get the problem that data gets truncated.

I really meant my first sentence seriously. If you don't like the way SQLite does things,
better use a more sophisticated DBMS (postrgeSQL or MySQL (with InnoDB) for example).
I heard there is a fairly popular web-GUI available for MySQL as well ;-)

Reported by crazy4chrissi on 2012-11-26 20:00:56

[Christopher Kramer]

As long as nobody gives a good reason why this makes sense, I'll mark it as "Won't fix."

Reported by crazy4chrissi on 2012-11-28 10:56:18 - Status changed: WontFix

[Christopher Kramer]

Issue 165 has been merged into this issue.

Reported by crazy4chrissi on 2013-01-12 19:13:11