I am faced with an unusual problem in a project that I am developing. The requirements are not clear regarding the size of a dozen or so text area input fields on the web page and as a result of which, I find myself having to change not only the database column to increase length but also to change the size parameter specified in my JSF validator for that text area component. Since the code has changed, an emergency deployment is necessary which makes a lot of people mad. Unfortunately, no one is quite sure what length these data elements should be and we expect it to change often. I changed my varchars to clobs but unfortunately the clob sizes were also too small and had to be increased as well.
Are there any tools or APIs that will help me address this problem? Or any best practices? I am considering building a small, on demand feature that will generate all db column lengths and make it available to the application via a singleton class. The UI view would then reference that particular element thus eliminating the need for code deployment.

Does anyone have any better solutions?

I am using JSF1.2+EJB3+Weblogic+Oracle DB stack.

Thanks a lot for looking.