Text fields

A Text field contains text. A Text field uses all the usual field properties, which are described in "Field properties". There are additional properties.

When the Localizable property is selected, it indicates that this field should be exported during instance data export for translation. Selecting this property specifies that this field is meant to have secondary language values. By default, this property is cleared.

Locator fields cannot be localized and have the Localization property cleared and read-only. A locator field contains a value from another record. The localization of the value is controlled by that other record. If the other record is localizable, the language values stored in the referenced business object record are used when rendering the translated value to the user. To localize a locator field, set the Localizable property in the referenced business object field.

Should you change an existing Text field from localizable to not localizable after the field has existing language values and internal values, you will see a warning message. The stale values remain in the language table.

The Default Value property is used to specify an initial value for the field.

The Size property is used to specify the maximum number of characters which can be stored in this field.

The Validation property may have no value, in which case anything entered in a user interface for the value of the Text field is acceptable. These are the other possible values you can select for Validation property:

Make Lower Case: If the value of this property is Make Lower Case, any value for this field is acceptable. However, any upper case letters entered into this field are converted to lower case.
Make Upper Case: If the value of this property is Make Upper Case, any value for this field is acceptable. However, any lower case letters entered into this field are converted to upper case.
Alpha Only No Spaces: If the value of this property is Alpha Only No Spaces, then whatever is entered in a user interface as a value for this field may contain only letters. Anything that contains numbers, spaces or punctuation is not acceptable.
Only Numeric: If the value of this property is Only Numeric, then only digits may be entered in a user interface as a value for this field.

The hyperlinks in the Formula property allow us to enter a formula that determines the value of this field. The details of how to specify a formula are described in "Formulas".

Attention: There is a 1000 character limit on the length of the text in a Text field. If you need a field that can contain an unlimited number of characters, consider using a Note field. Note fields are discussed in "Note fields".

Tip: If you encounter instances of special characters in Text fields saving as question marks, this can be caused by database encoding. To check, run the following query on your database:

select value from NLS_DATABASE_PARAMETERS
where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET'

If the value returned is not a type UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding, this may be the cause of the issue. For example a common default encoding for NLS_CHARACTERSET is WE8MSWIN1252, which is a 1 byte per character encoding that cannot store as many character types as UTF-8. Changing the character encoding for the database should resolve this issue but also will result in slower performance.

Tip: Text field names should end with TX for easy identification later, e.g., cstNameTX.