Thanks Breck
Already did the investigation with SAP Support. Looking at the Interface with the log. Apparently they have known about this since version 6. Very poorly documented, awaiting the unwary. It happens with any varchar where it sees something like a control sequence - so All text fields are subject to alteration on their way to the database (not just rich text). Type a \n in the middle of some text and see what is does.
If users occasionally use \n anywhere in their text data, it will be eaten - and they may never notice - only the new rich text control exposed this - but it happens everywhere. So while we could use blobs for rich text to get around this - we can have only one blob update per row and the datawindow in powerbuilder won't let you update it like any other field - a lot of gymnastics.
So this means we go back to disablebind = 0. However this affects how defaults work in PowerBuilder. With Disable Bind = 0, the datawindow will set a column with no value to Null and the database default will not operate. This means we have to supply defaults in the datawindow if the column is available in the update. A lot of backtracking.
There are also places where the size of our update exceeds the ODBC SQL buffer size with the inclusion of Bind Variables. We have to research thousands of these to see which they are and then dynamically change the Bind Variable setting during the Insert/Update.
My upset with this is that I naively assumed that what you put in a varchar column on an insert is not altered on its way into the database, and there were absolutely no warning flags in any documentation.
This could create some conundrums for us where the update won't work with DisableBind=0 but we need to preserve the integrity of the text data...
BTW - I would argue the point about rich text not being