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michellechopin
Community Advisor
michellechopinCommunity Advisor
Community Advisor
July 23, 2024
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Custom Activity Field Types - Missing Options?

  • July 23, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 2439 views

Hello my lovely Community!

 

I'm currently setting up some Custom Activities for the first time (I love an opportunity to learn something new in Marketo!) and one of the fields I need to add on several of the activities is a URL capture.

 

There is no URL field type in the options:

 

Of course, I dived right into the Community to check out what I could use as an alternative and came across this post where @darshil_shah1 notes that a URL field is best for storing information that is ONLY a URL and @sanfordwhiteman noted that a Textarea field would be better for entire URLs because URL fields are limited to 255 characters.

 

However, there's no Textarea field either so my only option appears to be a String field (which also has a limit of 255 characters). I also checked the Custom Field Type Glossary and Field Types where there are a lot more fields defined than there are available for Custom Activity fields - are options intentionally limited here or am I missing something (literally)? 

 

As always, appreciate Community help  😀

Michelle

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Best answer by SanfordWhiteman
You're stuck unless you use multiple fields, like one for the host+path and another for the query string.

Another recommendation if your URLs contain a lot of encoded characters (i.e. any non-ASCII) is to store the *decoded* form, which takes up fewer code units. For example, "%C3%A9” takes 6 units of 255 while the unencoded "é" takes only 1.

1 reply

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhitemanAccepted solution
Level 10
July 24, 2024
You're stuck unless you use multiple fields, like one for the host+path and another for the query string.

Another recommendation if your URLs contain a lot of encoded characters (i.e. any non-ASCII) is to store the *decoded* form, which takes up fewer code units. For example, "%C3%A9” takes 6 units of 255 while the unencoded "é" takes only 1.
michellechopin
Community Advisor
michellechopinCommunity AdvisorAuthor
Community Advisor
July 24, 2024

Appreciate the quick reply @sanfordwhiteman! 

 

I'm setting up these Custom Activities for an Oktopost integration and that field will be used to capture Post URLs from social media networks - I'm not sure if it's likely to go beyond 255 characters but we'll be doing some testing once I'm finished so we can get a better idea of things. I'd be hesitant to use two fields to accommodate a longer URL as I don't know that will integrate with Oktopost properly.

 

Is there a reason that those options aren't included on the Custom Activities, do you know? It seems odd that those field types are referenced in the documentation I reviewed but aren't available for use 🤔 🤔

 

Thanks for your insight as always  😀

Michelle

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
July 24, 2024

Yeah, lotsa places where the full scope of datatypes isn’t available (PMCFs is another one).

 

I’d definitely try to use 2 fields, 255 is not a lot.

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