TYPO3 table wizard limitations in TYPO3 11.5+

I recently updated a TYPO3 website for one of my clients from TYPO3 10.4 to 11.5. The whole update went pretty smooth and the client was happy with the new version except one thing. The table wizard in TYPO3 11.5 (TCA renderType='textTable') was causing some problems, as it now was always rendered.

The table wizard is really helpful if you want to create a table directly in TYPO3. You can add columns and rows as shown on the screenshot below.

My client however used to copy data from a CSV file and paste it to the bodytext field of the table content element. Usually, the pasted CSV consisted of several thousand lines of data, so the TYPO3 table wizard had to render many thousands of input fields in the table wizard, which was really slow. But that was not the only limitation I had to deal with, since the data was not saved to the TYPO3 database. I quickly realized, that the PHP variable max_input_vars was causing this problem, since it was set to 1500 - the minimal recommended value if you use TYPO3. Since the table wizard created many thousand input fields for the huge tables, PHP refused to accept all data in the POST request, which resulted in the described problem that not all data was saved. Update 30.03.2023 - the problem with the max_input_vars has been fixed in TYPO3 11.5 and 12.

The solution for this problem was easy. I just disabled the table wizard using a TCA override as shown below:

unset($GLOBALS['TCA']['tt_content']['types']['table']['columnsOverrides']);

This disables the TYPO3 table wizard for the table content element and my client could again easily copy and paste CSV data into the bodytext field.