I was wondering if someone could help me with modifying ModuleSettings SettingValue field data type from nvarchar to text. I have to save large amount of data in that field for my custom made module and it would be a lot easier if I just change field type. I already modified stored procedures and field type but there is no change in outcome. Everything is working normal as before but I cannot save more than 4000 characters (and the field is now defined as text) in that SettingValue column. I can save it using enterprise manager but when I load settings inside code it only returns 4000 characters. I searched the code for possible restrictions but I haven't found it.

Al,

I had a similar problem but only needed a little bit more space ... so I zipped the data in the field.  Zip can give you up to 70% compression on average text data..  So,  you could store up to 10,000 characters or so.  All depends on the data. 

Since DNN already references a Zip library (ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.BZip2), it was relatively easy to call the zip routine prior to storing the data, as unzipping when referencing it .   

I STRONGLY recommend NOT changing this table in the Core.  As many modules depend on this table for their presistency of data and may have trouble is the table is changed.   Besides, you will need to "fix" the table during every upgrade .. ugh! ..

Try the following to compress ... InValue is the string to be compressed and CompressBuffer is the compressed result.

oCompressMemory = New System.IO.MemoryStream
zosCompressed = New BZip2OutputStream(oCompressMemory)

byteBuffer = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(InValue)
zosCompressed.Write(byteBuffer, 0, byteBuffer.Length)

zosCompressed.Finalize()
zosCompressed.Close()

byteBuffer = oCompressMemory.ToArray()
CompressBuffer = Convert.ToBase64String(byteBuffer)

Give it a try and see if that helps.  Search thru the DNN Source for lots of examples...
Paul.

EDIT:  Just notice that also encoded the result into Base64  string ... that's not really required, but insures the string only contain "printable"  character .. this will make the string a bit longer then the raw compressed data.