We worked on Payment Connector and created XML files for the custom payment meta class import. Two of the fields of the imported metaclass have a type of LongString. Please see the below meta field definition for details:
<MetaField><Namespace>Mediachase.Commerce.Orders</Namespace><Name>CyberSourceGooglePayData</Name><FriendlyName>CyberSource Google Pay Data</FriendlyName><Description>CyberSource Google Pay Data</Description><DataType>LongString</DataType><Length>8000</Length><AllowNulls>True</AllowNulls><SaveHistory>False</SaveHistory><AllowSearch>False</AllowSearch><MultiLanguageValue>False</MultiLanguageValue><IsSystem>False</IsSystem><Tag></Tag><Attributes><Attribute><Key>useincomparing</Key><Value>False</Value></Attribute></Attributes><OwnerMetaClass>CyberSourceGooglePayPayment</OwnerMetaClass></MetaField>The above-described meta field is created in the database as a column with type nvarchar(1) using EPiServer.Commerce.Core.13.24.0, while on EPiServer.Commerce.Core.13.20.0, the same meta field is created as ntext type, using the same XML for the metaclass and meta fields import.
I did not found any release notes related to the metadata type changes. Since in EPiServer.Commerce.Core.13.20.0 the old types are available, the changes to the metadata types were applied in one of the versions between 13.20.0 and 13.24.0.
LongString metadata type mapping in EPiServer.Commerce.Core.13.20.0:
LongString metadata type mapping in EPiServer.Commerce.Core.13.24.0:
Are these changes final ones? If so, what type of metadata do you recommend to use instead of the old LongString type which mapped to ntext SQL data type?