How to insert text at beginning of field

[George Corder]

I have a action script "Prompt for text" that stores the users text in a variable that I want to insert at the beginning of and existing field while retaining any text the field may already have. Is there an action script step that will perform this step of inserting the variable text at the beginning of the field?

[Doug Page]

Re: How to insert text at beginning of field

George,

How about under fields -> Set Field Value, select the field you want to change, Specify an expression that evaluates to the value and set your expression to Variable+FieldName. Not knowing what result you need from your question, you might have to use a trim function to get your desired result.

Doug

[Stan Mathews]

Re: How to insert text at beginning of field

I have a action script "Prompt for text" that stores the users text in a variable that I want to insert at the beginning of and existing field while retaining any text the field may already have. Is there an action script step that will perform this step of inserting the variable text at the beginning of the field?

Is the field a memo field? You could quickly run into trouble if it is not. I don't think you could do this with action scripting but I remember some other threads ablut doing this with xbasic.

[George Corder]

Re: How to insert text at beginning of field

No, this is a 35 character field.

[Stan Mathews]

Re: How to insert text at beginning of field

No, this is a 35 character field.

Multiple insertions could "push" the existing text out of existence, in whole or in part.

The xbasic for an inline xbasic action to do this would look like

prev = alltrim(mem.value)
mem.value = alltrim(var->vctext)+" "+prev
parentform.Commit()

Where "mem" is the object name of the text field and "vctext" is the name of the variable holding the result of the prompt. Assumes you want to leave a space between the new text and the previous text.

Should be easy enough to add an inline xbasic action after your action scripting for the prompt on a button onpush event.

[DaveM]

Re: How to insert text at beginning of field

May I suggest you use operations: right click, choose new operation, choose update records, choose the table you wish to work with, (you will get a browse look), in the left column choose the field, in the second column enter "text you want inserted" +" "+ the field name.

Run the operation with the thunderbolt at the top.

This will update all the records to date.

If you want to add the text at the time some one puts data in, it can be done from the form using a similar design with action scripting and a little xbasic.

Hope it helps.

Dave Mason

[George Corder]

Re: How to insert text at beginning of field

Thanks, I will try the xbasic.