Howto extend a civi db field's size (maxlength, varchar)

Question

We are facing a problem with CiviCRM's default field length for organization names.

Background: In our setup we handle big departments or organizational units as distinct contacts. Since the sole department's name isn't sufficient for naming the contact and due to some limitations of CiviCRM (as discussed here) we've decided to compose the the name from the base organization name and the department's name.

Example:

Contact A: Base Organization named "University of Bielefeld",
Contact B: Department of A named "University of Bielefeld || Faculty of Physics"
Contact C: Department of A named "University of Bielefeld || FooBar Institute"

This leads in come cases to names exceeding the maxlength of contact name fields which is 128.

Setting those in the database is easy but adjusting CRM/Contact/DAO/Contact.php's column definitions makes core updates harder :/

How would you handle this? @Civi developers: Any chance to make field size configurable or increase size to 255 in general?

Answer 1

Interesting one. I would probably add a custom field at Organization level with the full name and use an abbreviated version in the display name. Possibly add an extension to show the custom name in forms with the buildForm hook and the summary hook. Also add an apiWrapper hook to add the longer name to the API.