Custom Activity Field Types - Missing Options?

[michellechopin]

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

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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]

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]

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.

[michellechopin]

Ah gotcha - glad it's not something broken on my end 😋

Our team uses Bit.ly which also integrates with Oktopost - I'm going to confirm that those links will be added to Marketo in Bit.ly format; if not, I'll connect with their integration specialist to see how we can use two fields to accommodate the URLs as needed.

Thank you for your expertise!

Michelle