# Increasing string length beyond 255 for long geotraces

**URL:** <https://forum.getodk.org/t/increasing-string-length-beyond-255-for-long-geotraces/14937>\
**Category:** Support\
**Tags:** form-design, odk-aggregate\
**Created:** [September 3, 2018, 8:51am UTC](https://forum.getodk.org/t/increasing-string-length-beyond-255-for-long-geotraces/14937 "2018-09-03T08:51:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 12

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**Author:** ![LN](https://getodk.b-cdn.net/user_avatar/forum.getodk.org/ln/32/1605_2.png) [@LN](https://forum.getodk.org/u/LN)\
**Post date:** [September 3, 2018, 6:27pm UTC](https://forum.getodk.org/t/increasing-string-length-beyond-255-for-long-geotraces/14937/12 "2018-09-03T18:27:15Z")

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Great to see everyone jumping in to help here!

It looks like there is some old documentation around. As @ggalmazor has described, it should not be necessary to modify XML for this feature to work.

I have updated the documentation [on increasing the Aggregate database field length](https://docs.opendatakit.org/aggregate-field-length/) with the current recommended approach.

The XLSForm should look like:

| type | name | label | bind::odk:length |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| select\_multiple opt\_abc | multi | Select multi | 500 |
| geoshape | shape | Select an area | 1000 |

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_[View the full topic](https://forum.getodk.org/t/increasing-string-length-beyond-255-for-long-geotraces/14937)._