Formatting and Display
of String Segment Values
For years I have wanted to have a simple way of imposing a telephone number display mask on telephone number values displayed in a list field. This was the impetus behind my request for a function that would allow us to impose a display mask on a string - which the creators of Omnis Studio have finally granted in the form of the format() function.
My purpose in writing this Monograph is to prepare the Omnis Studio developer to take better advantage of this new facility. Its best uses require a thorough knowledge of display masks, which we have so far only used with Masked Entry Fields on Window classes and Entry Fields on Report classes. (Remote Forms can also now have Masked Entry Fields in Studio 4.1, by the way - another of my requests answered...) This is not simply a set of code snippets to be copied from the example library to your own. It is hoped that the explanation and discussion will help inspire you to create more interesting and useful application interfaces involving this and related features of Omnis Studio.
This Monograph required 28 pages (with no illustrations, but some code listings and tables) for the explanations. It is in pdf format and is written as a US letter sized document with two columns per page for better readability. (If printing to other paper sizes, use the scaling feature of your printer driver for best results.) Some future Monographs may require more or fewer pages, but I intend to present a reasonably thorough treatment of each technique.
This monograph comes with an example library written using Omnis Studio version 4.1. Since the main focus of the monograph is the format() function, it is pointless to create an example library in anything less! But even if you have not upgraded your work to Studio 4.1, you can still download a copy from the Omnis web site at http://www.omnis.net/download/studiodownload.html. Without a proper serial number, this copy can still be used for an hour at a time with no other limitations - plenty of time to explore a section of these examples.
You never know what you might learn in these documents...
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