Date format screen dies with a PDO error when the format is longer than 100 characters [#827086]

If you go to admin/config/regional/date-time/formats/add and add a date format with more than 100 characters, you get a nice big red error:

PDOException: SQLSTATE[22001]: String data, right truncated: 1406 Data too long for column 'format' at row 1

The form needs to do some validation to prevent people from entering a format longer than what is allowed in the database.

Also, I think we might really consider a schema change to pump up the size of that database column; 100 seems somewhat arbitrary. (I hit the limit because I was trying to inject some HTML in there so part of the date format could be styled differently from other parts, and when you do that, the characters count up fast.)

Comment	File	Size	Author
#5	date_format_maxlength.patch	870 bytes	mcarbone
#5

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Comments

Comment #1

David_Rothstein CreditAttribution: David_Rothstein commented 14 June 2010 at 16:04

I think this qualifies as a "major" bug, although maybe not quite critical. Blank screens with big red error messages are bad.

Comment #2

marcingy CreditAttribution: marcingy commented 22 July 2010 at 04:55

Priority:

Normal

» Major

Changing to major as per tag.

Comment #3

MustangGB CreditAttribution: MustangGB commented 22 July 2010 at 12:01

Tag update

Comment #4

dawehner

German

CreditAttribution: dawehner commented 27 August 2010 at 18:45

I guess 255 would be long enough for many people?

Comment #5

mcarbone CreditAttribution: mcarbone commented 9 September 2010 at 00:37

Status:

Active

» Needs review

File	Size
date_format_maxlength.patch	870 bytes

If anything, 100 characters is too long for the date format string -- there are hardly even 30 qualified characters provided by PHP (http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php) and I'm fairly certain I've never seen a date format string longer than 10 characters. If someone can provide a real world example as to a 100+ character date format string, then I might be persuadable -- but in general it's not good practice in the service of performance to make database fields bigger for no good reason. (The reason stated in the original issue was the desire to use HTML, which isn't the proper use of the date format string.)

All that's really needed here is a FAPI maxlength attribute.

Comment #6

David_Rothstein CreditAttribution: David_Rothstein commented 9 September 2010 at 04:07

Status:

Needs review

» Reviewed & tested by the community

@mcarbone, well, not really - in addition to the characters that get interpreted, PHP deliberately lets you put arbitrary characters in there so you can construct it as a sentence, etc. And 100 is extremely arbitrary when it comes to database column sizes; the performance effect of making it bigger would really be negligible.

However, the patch is good and solves the main part of the bug, so I'm marking it RTBC.