Solved: How to prevent leading spaces being clipped?

MichaelQ · Post by **MichaelQ** » Tue Feb 27, 2018 9:54 pm

I have a text attribute that contains leading spaces for formatting purposes.
How can I prevent them automatically being clipped when displayed in a query?

Thank you.

MichaelQ · Post by **MichaelQ** » Fri Mar 02, 2018 9:48 am

Anyone?

Jaymer · Post by **Jaymer** » Fri Mar 02, 2018 11:21 pm

what if you had a 2nd field (Field2) that was always initialized to your desired field.
Field2 is a type HTML.
You do a REPLACE (or whatever) to change leading spaces to  
Display this field in the query

jaymer...

aware_support · Post by **aware_support** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 12:04 am

The TRIM function clips both leading and trailing spaces. Check it out.

MichaelQ · Post by **MichaelQ** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 12:28 pm

Thanks Jaymer.
I didn't understand what you meant by "Field2 is a type HTML". I couldn't find an HTML field type. So I just used a text attribute and added leading spaces using '  ' as you suggest, which worked!

Thanks Support.
I searched for 'TRIM' in the User Guide & Rule Language pdfs but couldn't find any reference to this function. Anyway Jaymer's solution worked.

Jaymer · Post by **Jaymer** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 9:19 pm

glad that worked

the HTML is an option for FORMAT on a Plain Text field. (see pic)

: Screen Shot 2018-03-03 at 4.16.20 PM.png (45.33 KiB) Viewed 16009 times

I was suggesting you'd have a rule to pad with the blanks. In this example, I just typed this in using the HTML formatter.

Here's how it would look in a Query

: Screen Shot 2018-03-03 at 4.14.22 PM.png (16.03 KiB) Viewed 16009 times

Jaymer · Post by **Jaymer** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 9:22 pm

Here is whats stored in the database for the HTML field:

: Screen Shot 2018-03-03 at 4.21.05 PM.png (13.83 KiB) Viewed 16009 times

MichaelQ · Post by **MichaelQ** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 10:23 pm

Thank you.
This solution raises a question about programming elegance.

I am displaying a nested hierarchy by padding spaces using a 'TreeDepth' attribute which may be 0-9. Currently I have to write a rule for each level like this (each level is indented by 4 spaces):

If Item.TreeDepth=1 Then
Item.Name4Tree='    '+Item.Name

Is there a way that I could write one rule which will add the required number of spaces according to the TreeDepth?

MichaelQ · Post by **MichaelQ** » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:57 pm

I figured out how to compose this action more concisely so that each level in the hierarchy is indented by an additional 6 spaces:

Item.Name4Tree=''
Item.Name4Tree=PAD_LEFT(Item.Name,' ',Item.TreeDepth*6+LENGTH(Item.Name))

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