You should see how the field is defined first:
1. Form definition
look into the
administrator/component/yourcomponent/models/forms/somename.xml
there you could find a form definition, if so it will also specify the field type: depending on the type there are several available filters; for example the default textarea will strip html, and you need to set
filter="raw"
in order to enable it. see http://docs.joomla.org/Standard_form_field_and_parameter_types for a list of fields, click and you can find the available format options.
2. model
If the model inherits from JModelAdmin or JModelForm or other JModel* it will automatically handle binding of the forms' data to the database, look for the Save function which should receive the form $data.
3. more There are at least another dozen possibilities. If the above didn't help, try finding the form: possibly you could find it just by looking at the markup. Once you have the form, check the following fields:
- option
- task
- view
This should help you find the php code that is invoked based on the form:
- if view is set, maybe in ./views/someview/view.html.php you could find the saving logic.
- if task is set, look for a function with the same name in ./controller.php
- if task contains a ".", look for the controller in the ./controllers/ folder.
- if option is not the name of your component, your component is sending the data to another component for saving, and most likely set a return-url