Is there a simple way to increase the maxlength value of a plain text field that has data in it already?
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To directly answer the question, there is no simple way in Drupal 8 to modify the schema for a field once it's been populated with data.
But, there is a more complicated way to manage it.
We've used the work done here by J-P Stacey to update a field in our platform.
- ALTER the database tables directly using raw SQL.
- Change the site configuration for the field.
- Force the current, "desired" schema records in Drupal to match.
- Force the "most recently installed" schema records to also match.
Additional information can be found in this article written by Marcus Bernal.
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I haven't been able to find one for D8. This example here is pretty close to what you need to do. The gist of it is: collect the field data, remove the field from the db,define and add the new field,put the data back in. I haven't tested this solution but there will be some challenges. If you have a lot of data you may run out of php memory. It also looks like you'll need to do some additional work to update the configs to match. – ec0g Feb 10 '18 at 18:40
