Proper Case Function

thom

I have a first name, last name, and company name field in a BO and was wondering if there is any way to enforce a capital letter where appropriate?

There are several proper case exceptions to the first letter (like the quote or the hyphen) that I would like to include, but I would be happy just to have the first letter capitalized and it does not matter if it happens at the time of data entry or as an update afterward.

I have a SQL Server user defined function to do this for a couple of other applications, but adding a trigger to fire this function does not really seem appropriate for the Aware framework

thanks

Craig

You can use an appropriate regular expression to enforce this in the input mask field

thom

exellent - I did not think of that - kind of got stuck in calculated field thinking

thanks

technopak

Hi Thom,

I guess you could use a combination of WORD_NUMBER, TO_UPPER_CASE, and CHARS_FROM_LEFT coupled with an IF CONTAINS structure to achieve your goal.

Input masks look good, but creating your own procedure to capitalise where appropriate would enable your lazy users to be careless - and the system still cope 🙂

Peter

thom

Technopak,

I like that idea better - I have found a regualar expression to do this, but when I have a sometime I will see if I can get this one working and compare. Thanks for the help

thom

tford

Thom,

Can you share what you found?

bazar2009

Hey Tom,

Not sure which one Thom is using but I use this website for regular expressions. It has been of great help finding starting points (or exact matches) for my needs.

http://regexlib.com/Default.aspx

They currently have over 2500 regular expressions.

Bazar

thom

Tom,

The regular expression
/^{[A-Z]+[a-zA-Z]*}(\s|-)?([A-Z]+[a-zA-Z])?(\s|-)?([A-Z]+[a-zA-Z])?$/
forces the input mask of capitalization at data entry. There are a couple of obvious drawbacks. The most important being that it forces the user to correct their own entry. This doesn't exactly resolve my issue, but it buys me sometime.

Before technopaks reply, I was thinking that I would create a java level function library for which i could call this into a calculated field as a string function rather than as an input mask. This is something I would like to do, just to see how to add these functions and how they preform.

I will see if I can work through using the the calculation using WORD_NUMBER, TO_UPPER_CASE, AND CHARS_FROM_LEFT probably sooner because it looks like the quicker approach.

I'll post what I have discovered for both methods.

thom

I created a rule that will set the first letter to upper case

IF Contacts IS NEW THEN Contacts.FirstName = REPLACE_PATTERN (Contacts.FirstName, SUBSTRING(Contacts.FirstName,0,1), TO_UPPER_CASE(SUBSTRING(Contacts.FirstName,0,1)))

Had problems getting the WORD_COUNT or CHARS_FROM_LEFT and thought I read that they where unsupported within SQL Server...? Should I be able to use SQL Server functions of CHARINDEX or PATINDEX to accomplished a more complete instance of the proper case calculate?

This certainly does not get me 100% of what I was looking but it is closer because it removes the edit mask from forcing the user.

I still like to force auto proper case at the time of enter rather then a calculated field and I started to tackle building a custom java function(my first so it will take me a while) and while this will provide a better solution (because I can include hyphens, and apostrohies), but then it occurred to me that I still will need a rule to do this for all my contact name and address fields - is this the best approach?

thanks

technopak

Hi Thom,

I looked briefly at what can be done using the text functions and came up with the following rule which capitalises the first letter of the specified BO attribute -

If Object IS NEW THEN
Object.FirstName = TO_UPPER_CASE(CHARS_FROM_LEFT(Object.FirstName,1)) + SUBSTRING(Object.FirstName, LENGTH(Object.FirstName)-(LENGTH(Object.FirstName)-1),LENGTH(Object.FirstName))

I don't know if automatic capitalisation is what you're after, or whether you need to check if the entered first character is lowercase before capitalising it - maybe capitalising everything might be an option, the user won't notice anything at runtime 🙂

Such a rule would be needed for all text entry attributes that you need to validate.

And this is working fine on MySQL too !

Does this help ?

Peter

thom

technopak,

thanks for the reply and the rule - I had started down a similiar path based upon your earlier comment but gave up in favor of the REPLACE_PATERN because I could not work it out. Its nice to know that I was close.

I would prefer automatic captialization but I will settle for rule on every text field (needs to proper rather then all upper, it gets merged into letters, labels, emails,...etc)

This is a common feature of other development platforms, but compared to everything else, I am much farther along in so many other ways that its not worth trading some of the very fine tuning.

Thanks again for the rule
thom