How to add longDescription (Rich text) attribute on Parts ?

Hi Vivek,

there is a small customization that can be done to allow adding rich attributes to types, based on change objects case, but considering:

• It will only apply to "local" attributes, and not "global" attributes. Global attributes will need more customization as new database tables are required. For local attributes, the addColumns utility allows to add new columns of type InlineBLOB that can be used for this kind of attributes (in fact, it will create 3 new columns in the database table per each "virtual" column added with the utility)
• It requires to extend an OOTB Java class
• It requires to update manually the database to edit a field that will allow to have "Rich Text" value selectable on the data type dropdow when creating a new local attribute
• Probably you will need to create custom Java classes to "move" values from previous attributes to new ones. For change objects, PTC includes tools to move values for "Description" attribute, but I suppose that this will not work for custom attributes
• These attributes probably will not be indexed and/or searchable, as the value will be stored as BLOB in the database. Also, there will be issues trying to display these attributes on tables
• I do not know if this customization is supported by PTC and if creating this kind of attributes can have any issues with future upgrades of new functionalities included in next releases

We are working with this on a customer but still in testing phase trying to identify all implications.

If you are still interested on this, please contact me directly, because I prefer not to publish this on the community to prevent uses that can cause future problems to other users that don't realize about all the implications

Regards