about a year ago, we created a custom attribute on the defect workitem, and I created some custom code to create a lightweight integration with another system until the Email template support comes (now available in 4.0)..

but when we created the variable, the author picked Large String datatype.. unfortunately using Large constrains a lot of useful query options.. can't easily do contains, or equals, or...

a use case we want.. find all the defects where the custom field is not null.
find all the defects where the customer field contents is 'xyz',
report on all the defects that have the field set (this field contains the support system ticket number)
so we can do math on how many defects are customer sourced vs development sourced..

BUT.. there is no easy way to change an existing field type.. I say easy, cause I think I have a round about way to actually define and use a different field..  but the query code still uses the original field definition, and won't allow query on the new (same id as old) field. so after all the work, we don't actually have any improvement

my production team are nervous about changing the code I wrote, when we are just a few months away from  V4.0. so I don't think I can change to another field name/id under the covers..

is there any known way to get the query editor to not use the old LARGE field definition (stored with the old data field in the database), and use the new Medium one instead?

thanks for any pointers

Sam