Controls for
Formatting Alert Messages
Welcome to week #18 of the
KnowledgeSync Educational Bulletin for Business Partners
and clients who are using KnowledgeSync.
This week's question:
I'm trying to create an alert message where the output
is a list of overdue invoices and I want the list to
appear as columns - invoice number, customer name,
amount due, and so on. My problem is that the columns
don't line up. Is there an easy way to make columns line
up - without using HTML?
Answer:
Fortunately, yes - there are some very useful formatting
commands that you can use in your alert messages -
including a command that limits the length of a field's
value AND pads out that value to the full length.
Let's say you have a field called {Customer_Name}. To
allocate 25 spaces (bytes) to that field, you would
(before the closing brace) insert a colon followed by
"25". And - to pad out those names to the full 25 spaces
(thus ensuring that the following column lines up),
you'd add the "+" sign. Your field would thus look like:
{Customer_Name:25+}
Here are some other handy formatting controls:
{sales_amount:10$} (currency; right-justified; limited
to 10 digits)
{sales_amount:10&} (currency; left-justified; limited to
10 digits)
{sales_units:10#} (numeric, 2 decimal places;
right-justified; limited to 10 digits)
{sales_units:10%} (numeric, 2 decimal places;
left-justified; limited to 10 digits)
{sales_units:10!} (numeric, no decimal; right-justified;
limited to 10 digits)
{sales_units:10*} (numeric, no decimal; right-justified;
limited to 10 digits)
{MiscChgCode:15+~} (character; allocate no space in the
alert if this field is null)
If you have questions about any of these formatting
controls, please contact either Don Farber at farber@vineyardsoft.com
or KnowledgeSync support at:
http://www.vineyardsoft.com/html/email_support.html
Vineyardsoft Corporation
1-800-850-8055
info@vineyardsoft.com
www.vineyardsoft.com
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