Hi Lars,
By default, the description fields are set to 2,000 characters. You can increase this value, but please keep in mind this can have negative performance impact within SQL. Therefore, I would suggest that you examine the process and capabilities of your SQL deployment prior to making this change. That being said, there is not a way to change this within the UI in CRM 4.0. To make this change, you will need to export the customizations of the entity in question and then modify the MaxLength tag in the cutomizations.xml file for the "description" field or whatever the name is of the field in question on the “Ticket” entity. I have provided an example below on how to do this with the Case entity as I do not know your customizations and naming conventions used:
1. Go to IE, navigate to the CRM 4.0 URL.
2. Click on Settings > Customization > Export Customizations
3. Click on the check box next to Case
4. Click on Export Selected Customizations
5. Download the file to a location you can easily find.
6. Extract the files from the folder.
7. Open the customizations.xml file in Notepad++ or some other xml editing program.
8. In the document, hold the control + F key to perform a find. In the find, search for the value of "2000". Depending on your customizations, there may be more than one of these fields with 2,000 characters so please be mindful of the PhysicalName in the attribute tag you are modifying prior to making the change in the .xml.
Below is an example from the Case entity within customizations.xml file:
<attribute PhysicalName="Description">
<Type>ntext</Type>
<ValidForCreateApi>1</ValidForCreateApi>
<ValidForUpdateApi>1</ValidForUpdateApi>
<ValidForReadApi>1</ValidForReadApi>
<AttributeTypeId>00000000-0000-0000-00aa-11000000001c</AttributeTypeId>
<DisplayMask>ValidForAdvancedFind|ValidForForm|ValidForGrid</DisplayMask>
<Descriptions>
<Description description="Description of the case." languagecode="1033" />
</Descriptions>
<ImeMode>auto</ImeMode>
<RequiredLevel>none</RequiredLevel>
<Format>textarea</Format>
<MaxLength>2000</MaxLength>
<displaynames>
<displayname description="Description" languagecode="1033" />
</displaynames>
</attribute>
9. Modify the value to a desired length. Save the file and then move the customizations.xml file back into the customizations.zip folder to overwrite the existing file in the .zip folder.
10. Upload the customization back into CRM.
11. To upload the customization back into CRM, navigate to the CRM 4.0 URL in IE.
12. Click on Settings > Customization > Import Customizations
13. Browse for the updated .zip file and click Upload
14. The updated entity should now show up in the list. Click on it to highlight it and then click on Import Selected Customizations.
15. After it is imported, click on Customization on the left navigation pane and then click on Customize Entities.
16. Under More Actions, click on Publish All Customizations to ensure that the newly imported customizations have been published.
This should take care of the issue for you. One thing you may want to do after making the change and publishing the changes is expand the number of rows displayed for the “Description” field in CRM so users do not have to scroll as much in the event there is a large amount of text in the field. To do this, you can perform the following steps. I am using the Case entity again for this example:
1. Go to IE, navigate to the CRM 4.0 URL and click Settings > Customization > Customize Entities
2. Double-click on the Case entity
3. Click Forms and Views > Double-click Form (this is the main form) > Double-click on the Description field
4. In the Field Properties window, click on the Formatting tab. In this tab, there will be a Row Layout section. Choose the number of rows you wish to display.
5. Click OK
6. Click Save and Close
7. In the Entity: Case window, from step 3 where we selected the form, click on Actions > Publish to make the changes publish with CRM.
