numberz wrote
I just need to know if Awareim has the ummph and capabilities to be able to accomplish what is already a daily routine (and has been for many years) in much of the construction world of USA.
There are many ways to achieve what you are looking for and John has suggested options.
AIM is expremely powerful and extremely capable so it is not a matter of oomph it is a matter of complexity. Just because someone else has achieved this in another programming language it does not mean that it was a simple two click to achieve. That does not mean that AIM is deficient.
Any operation that is trying to achieve what you want will involve multiple steps and will require more than a simple solution.
As John and Jaymer have said you could create a text field with either an input mask or regex validation. For those numbers to then be useful to your system you will need to do some pattern matching to strip everything before the ‘ to be feet and everything after to be inches. You will then need to do validation on the second number to make sure that it is less than 12. If you are wanting the - to signify a number less than 12 you may need to use a display field, or you could use a business rule on the field
If you want it put in as 809 then your rule will need to count back the last two characters and do your substitution to convert it to 8’-9”.
It will become a bit cumbersome after a while. You could pass it all off to a process and restructure it there if you need to use it multiple places.
You will then probably need to be able to determine if the last two digits are more than 12; do you calculate that as x ft and modulo inches.
There are a few solutions provided here, are they perfect, probably not, but whatever your competitor application is I will bet you that it did not get solved in 5 minutes either.
Imperial measures are a pita and while being a pain doesn’t mean that you can ignore it as obviously your industry is deeply dependent on it, it does mean that the solution to your challenge is going to be less straightforward than a currency calculation or a metric calculation.
