I increased the 50 to 80 in the tables and that has fixed it, probably the simplest way however I have no idea if this was a bad idea especially later on down the line.

I looked around the SQL tables and find CHAR(200) all over, I assume the CHAR(50) could be in error? if not, then I would assume it is 50 for a some reason?

Anyway, for now it seems to all be working.

Kind Regards,
Steven Brewer

Based on:- This has been a problem for quite a while

You could assume that:-
Not many users have item desc >50 for purchasing. Those that do have not reported the issue, therefore there is a high likelihood that the purchase order is for internal use only.
So continuing to truncate the supplier_description in the purch_data table would still allow STRICT_ALL_TABLES to be used and most users would see no difference anyway. AND this is no different to what has been happening up to V2.4.6 so far.

So:-

File: \inventory\includes\db\items_purchases_db.inc
21:         .db_escape($supplier_description) . ")";

And

File: \inventory\includes\db\items_purchases_db.inc
32:         supplier_description=" . db_escape($supplier_description) . "

Could be changed to something like (Not tested):-

File: \inventory\includes\db\items_purchases_db.inc
21:         .db_escape(substr($supplier_description, 0, 50)) . ")";

And

File: \inventory\includes\db\items_purchases_db.inc
32:         supplier_description=" . db_escape(substr($supplier_description, 0, 50)) . "

Also two changes to function add_or_update_purchase_data in File: \purchasing\includes\purchasing_db.inc Lines 103 & 112

As stated code not tested, so please check.
It's certainly not the correct solution, but does delay db changes to V2.5

Thank you so much for your input.

What I did was to increase the char(50) to char(80) which covers the description characters for all items.

I installed a fresh copy of FA and had a look at the tables, they are char(50), making them char(80) fixed it.

I hope this wont cause any issues?

Is an 'ALTER TABLE' really a db change as such? - it shouldn't affect existing data?

Turn on debug(level2) in config.php and report errors found

Same issue here, only happens where item desc is longer than 50 characters - see screenshot below: reported in mantis

Is this the  result of changing to STRICT_ALL_TABLES:-
File connect_db_mysql.inc & connect_db_mysqli.inc
Line 13

define('SQL_MODE', 'STRICT_ALL_TABLES'); // prevents SQL injection with silent field content truncation

Before:- although supplier description was var(50) it used to truncate longer item desc.
Now as is strict it rejects it

The solution is to change table purch_data `supplier_description` to tinytext, but you have a db change ban until 2.5?