Contrib.social

Increase maximum length of 32 characters for field machine names to a higher limit

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 14 July 2021, over 3 years ago
Updated 20 September 2024, 7 months ago

Problem/Motivation

Currently the maximum length of machine names is limited to 32 characters.

See this change record: Entity type and bundle machine names have a maximum length of 32 characters →

It is a limit that is rather short and easy to hit when creating new content-entities and fields.
Cropped machine names show up in config-exports, so there are real artefacts of the 32 character limit in many projects.

I don't know the exact reason for 32, but I guess 8 or 16 was too short and higher numbers felt unneeded and possible lead to slower database performance.
I can't exactly tell if there are performance implications, but an increased size to 64, 128 or even 512 characters would be better IMO.

Answer Berdir https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3223605#comment-14164276 ✨ Increase maximum length of 32 characters for field machine names to a higher limit Active :

Not going to close the issue, but that's not really possible.

We didn't pick that number just for fun. field config entity IDs consist of entity type + bundle + field name. The max id length of a config entity is 166 ( \Drupal\Core\Config\Entity\ConfigEntityStorage::MAX_ID_LENGTH). entity types and bundles can each be 32. so 32 each gives you ~100 for fields. and bundles (node types) can't be longer than 32.

Field names then again are referenced in several tables, for example comment.

I strongly recommend to keep them as short as possible. Longer field names need to be hashed, which IMHO complicates the database structure. It's not really a performance issue, more a DX issue if you ever need to do some queries and things there to investigate things. Much easier to find the right tables then.

✨ Feature request
Status

Active

Version

11.0 🔥

Component
Configuration entity  →

Last updated 13 days ago

Created by

🇳🇱Netherlands ndf Amsterdam

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  • Comment 7 months ago →
    🇹🇷Turkey emircan erkul Turkey

    Can't we get some from ConfigEntityStorage::MAX_ID_LENGTH and use for machine names? 32+16=48 would be sweet spot IMO and ConfigEntityStorage::MAX_ID_LENGTH become 166-16=150

  • Comment 3 months ago →
    🇺🇸United States seanr

    I got curious as to the underlying reason for this limit and of course found it in the API docs - seems to be a file system limit:

    https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core%21lib%21Drupal%21Core%21Config%21...

    Most file systems limit a file name's length to 255 characters, so ConfigBase::MAX_NAME_LENGTH restricts the full configuration object name to 250 characters (leaving 5 for the file extension). The config prefix is limited by ConfigEntityType::PREFIX_LENGTH to 83 characters, so this leaves 166 remaining characters for the configuration entity ID, with 1 additional character needed for the joining dot.

    Not going to change the issue status myself, but perhaps this should be won't fix?

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