DatabaseError: value too long for type character varying(100)

Question

I have a Django web site running a mini CMS we've built internally years ago, it's using postgresql. When saving a simple title and a paragraph of text I get the following error:

value too long for type character varying(100)

The weird thing is, not a single column is varying(100) they are all 200 or 250, even the default Django ones have been changed from the 100 to 200 due to a re-opened ticket mentioned here

Does anyone know of a solution to this problem?

Answer 1

I can bet money you have a models.SlugField without length set. The default length is 50 characters, most likely it's not enough for your use case.

Change it to models.SlugField(max_length=255) and migrate your database schema.

Answer 2

I also had this problem when using a filefield and was scratching my head for a while. Of course the default FileField instances are created with a 100 character limit.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/fields/#filefield

Answer 3

This is an error message from Postgres and not django.

You seem to have changed the length of the field in the models.py, but that doesn't change the database length which was created when you did a manage.py syncdb.

You have to alter the length of the field in the database, directly.

Answer 4

Django 2.1

I encountered this problem while switching from sqlite3 to postgresql. Remove the migration files in each app's migrations folder except __init__.py Then re-run migration

(venv)myapp$python manage.py makemigrations
(venv)myapp$python manage.py migrate
(venv)myapp$python manage.py runserver

Answer 5

I had a similar problem with django-autoslugfield I was using a similar package and then switched over to django-autoslugfield

I was getting this error: value too long for type character varying(50)

despite the fact that my models.py had:

slug = AutoSlugField(max_length=255, populate_from='name', unique=True)

and in my db the it the type was character varying 255

once i remove max_length=255 from the field i.e.

slug = AutoSlugField(populate_from='name', unique=True)

then it worked fine

Answer 6

Michael Samoylov's answer pointed me in the right direction. I had the same error come up, except it was with a FileField.

Fields have a max_length, even if you have not explicitly set a max_length. Increase the value so that your data fits to avoid the error.

In my case, the data was too large to reasonably store in the database. I resorted to saving my file to disk, then saving the file path in the database.

Answer 7

i went through this same error. and when i made changes in the modele, i kept having the same error.

Here is how i fixed it. It might be necessary to skip few migrations for the program to only use the migration where changes have been made for the CharField max_lenght.

for that you have to run

python manage.py showmigrations 

to see which migrations have not been made.

then you skip them until you get to the last with the command

python manage.py migrate <app> 000_migration_number --fake