URL Field should support more than 255 characters

Summary

Currently URL custom field type in JIRA only supports 255 characters. In many cases, URLs can easily exceed 255 characters (like JIRA batch.js and batch.css URLs). This makes it impossible to save the URLs in the field.

Suggestion

Since it's very common for URLs to exceed 255 characters, this field type should support a bigger set of characters.

Failed Workaround

URL field values are stored into column stringvalue of table customfieldvalue. The default character length of this column is 255. Increasing this length (by manually altering the column) won't help. This is due to the fix for JRASERVER-17811:

UI catches the lengthy URL immediately and responds adequately with a `The entered text is too long. It exceeds the allowed limit of 255 characters.` message.

This means, URLs longer than 255 characters are rejected by the GUI before JIRA attempts to write them to the database.

Other Workarounds

Instead of URL field, considering using the followings:

1. Web Link, from More -> Link (this field is always Optional)
2. A multi-line Text field, which supports unlimited text, link rendering (via Wiki Style Render) and can be set as Required in Field Configurations