we have an electronic application on our website. we receive submissions as a list of the fields and their answers. (this application is not filemaker based, it's made and sent to us by the website host) he way i receive the answers is it will be a list like this:

first name: josh

last name: brown

street address: 1234 main st

city: boulder

state: CO

with the lines being return seperated, and each line being the name of the field before the colon, and their answer after it.

so far, we've been doing the data entry by hand, either copy and pasting one field at a time, or retyping it from one window to another.

i can't get the website company to return the submissions as only the answers given by the applicants, they are pretty inflexible as far as that goes. i know if it was just their answers, i could figure that out, altho i haven't spent too much time thinking about it, other than to fantasize about no more data entry...

i'm wondering if there's a way using the rightwords calc to extract their answer into the field on our database. it would save us tremendous amounts of data entry and potential mistakes.

the problem is that not everyone fills out every field. we have one for social security numbers, or other personal info that people don't wanna enter on a website. i understand their fear, but if i'm gonna set up automatic data entry or imoportation of their data, then i would need all the fields filled in, no?

if not, wouldn't the destination fields get scrambled when one field was blank, and the next field's data got entered into it instead?

any advice is appreciated greatly. thanks ya'll.

josh

Hi Josh,

You can parse the input text to separate field with calculations like:

FirstName =

Middle(input, Position(input, "first name:", 1 , 1 ) + Length("First Name:") + 1 , Position(input, "last name:", 1 , 1 )- Position(input, "first name:", 1 , 1 ) - Length("First Name:") - 1 )

Takes some fiddling to get this to work, but is a nice job for a rainy weekend!

I would suggest doing this a separate database, and have a sort of 'Submit' button that triggers a script that enters the data into your main 'Contacts' database, maybe after validating the uniqueness of the data.

Hope this helps,

Ernst