Increase the character length of a text field in ArcGIS Online

Summary

In ArcGIS Online, increasing the character length of a text field is useful when longer text are required, such as hyperlinks and concatenating text. However, it is not possible to increase the character length of an existing field. This article provides the workflow to increase the character length of the field by creating a new field with increased length and populating it with properties of the original field.

Procedure

1. In ArcGIS Online, on the Content tab, click the hosted feature layer to open its item page. On the item page, click the Data tab.
2. Add a new field. Refer to ArcGIS Online: Add a field for instructions. In Step 5(a), select Text > String. In Step 5(f), specify a value for the character length in the Length text box. In this example, it is 350.

3. In the Table view, click the newly created field header and select Calculate.
4. For Select language, click SQL. Click Next.
5. In the SQL expression window, click Fields and select the original field to add the field name to the expression box. In this example, Info is selected.

6. Click Run calculation.

If the original field contains truncated values, populate the new field with the full text from the original data source. The image below shows the newly created field, New_Info, contains more text characters than the original field, Info.