Question on Alphasports Invoice Entry Form

[Alastair]

Hi Folks,

A long time since I have needed to change anything on my database and I cannot remember a critical piece of information - I am hoping someone on here can help me with a suggestion.

Anyway the problem is this:

I have a field in my database which is a character string of 4 length similar to the field in the Alphasports example database (I think it was the Alpha Five Version 8 of the Alphasports example database - not the latest which is different) which holds sales peoples names. But I cannot remember how the field which is 4 chars long can hold the full name of the salesperson and display it correctly on the form even though it is obviously held internally as a number?

I want to use the left() function to return the first letter of each of the names (firstname, surname) to obtain their initials, however when I use the following code:

Left(Purchaser,1)+Left(PURCHASER,pos_from_word_number(PURCHASER,2))

It returns numbers instead e.g. 11 not AW which I expected

Somehow and this is the bit I cannot remember the Character 4 field PURCHASER is displaying the full name of the Purchaser on the form, but the value that is stored in the database is a number.

I think these values are stored in a table in the format:

Sales_person_id : Name

100 : Alastair Whyley

Sorry for the long post, but does this make sense to anybody?

[Tom Cone Jr]

Re: Question on Alphasports Invoice Entry Form

Check the help file topic

"Using a coded lookup field"

You'll probably need to retrieve the name from the lookup table using one of the lookup() functions.

[Alastair]

Re: Question on Alphasports Invoice Entry Form

Thanks for your reply Tom, you were spot on, it was using a table lookup. Its amazing how quickly you can forget these little tricks when you aren't doing this sort of programming frequently.

[Alastair]

Re: Question on Alphasports Invoice Entry Form

OK I have got the lookupc function to extract the name from the external table - I think, using the following:

dim tn as C
dim initials as C

tn = table.filename_get("salespeople")

initials=trim(lookupc("C","Purchaser","salespeople->Name",tn,"Sales_Person_Id"))

This returns a persons full name as a string e.g.:

"Alastair Whyley"

[Alastair]

Re: Question on Alphasports Invoice Entry Form

Well, I thought the above worked but when I tested it, it doesn't and I cannot see where I am going wrong. The help file on this command is not actually very helpful to me.

lookupc("C","Purchaser","salespeople->Name",tn,"Sales_Person_Id")

Can anyone see anything wrong with the above command and point me in the right direction?

It seems to return the same name each time if I use the "C" option whereas if I use the "F" option it always responds with "", I think it is something to do with the the next part of the command but haven't had enough time recently to get any further.