After a lot of searching and playing about I found a way to solve this. The text field is not limited to 256 characters as I found out, it was the returned value from the function that was only 255 characters. Now this may be helpful for others who are having the problem to note how this was solved.
Even though I had changed the value to return 1000 in the function it was still limiting to 255 characters in the report so naturally thought it was a report text limit but what I actually found was that the sub-report parameters were still holding onto the 255 character limit from the function - it does not refresh automatically. When you right click on the parameters in the list and select show data type I think it is called you will see varchar(255) displayed at the end of the parameter.
Now this made me think the report data value was still 255, which it was, but I was still thinking that this was the limit of the report and not the value from the DB. What I eventually found was that if I do a verify database from the report and then relink the report fields to the sub report then it picked up the new data length value. The function returning the value is called in the report procedure.
I also noticed that on one of the reports (this issue was evident in more than one report) I had to run the script against DB and recreate the report procedure before it picked up the new length value.
So I hope that helps for anyone with a similar problem with the data length of the text field.
G
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