Associate Description only 30 characters

When using the associate description in an application, is there any way to have it show more than 30 characters.  If you create a custom data item and have a business function as the edit rule, you can put a data item with more than 30 characters in the data structure.  I can see in the debug log that it is bringing back more than 30 characters but when it gets to the associate description, it only shows the first 30.  I think it's using DL01 which is 30.  I know you can handle it manually with a fetch single but was curious if there