Its been some time ago, where I think i wanted to use a text helper for something. But it is limited to a 255 character limit or something like that. Also reading/writing to a file is also not possible so the thing I wanted to do (I think I wanted to build a dashboard dynamically based on a longer string I needed to parse, even reading the yaml of another dashboard) was and is still not possible.
This limitation is very annoying and limits you when you want to build something that requires more flexibility in this regard. Adding a text helper that can store an unlimited amount of characters and reading/writing files from the file system would be appreciated.
The limitation is there to keep the database small. If it were unlimited, you could update any state to have an entire novel, any time a single letter in that novel changed it would duplicate that value again in the database. It could chew up your database in a matter of seconds if you screw up.
That type of information is typically kept out of the state machine, meaning an entity cant have that much info.
Then there should be a new type of helper, which is excluded from the DB. That would be a fair trade off between a limited characters helper vs a helper that just needs to hold a large(r) amount of characters.
We already have that, it’s attributes. You can add any template entity with an attribute and it can have unlimited size and it does not go into the database.
I’m just clarifying to you about the 255 limit and why it’s imposed on states.