long url makes field too wide

[cheezz]

I have a field which includes websites and url's -- some of these url's are very long. Without a space somewhere in it, FM sees it as one long word. When I export the database to a table format, I end up with one very wide field, trying to accomoodate this long "word". Is there any way to force this to wrap or something? With 4,000 records, I shudder to think of visually going through one by one and adding a space in the middle of each url!

I tried html width tags, but it doesn't care....

[zincb]

Try creating a calculated field:

URL_Splitter =

Middle ( URL , 1 , 50 ) & " " &

Middle ( URL , 51 , 50 ) & " " &

Middle ( URL , 101 , 50 ) & " " &

Middle ( URL , 151 , 50 ) & " " &

Middle ( URL , 201 , 50 ) & " " &

Middle ( URL , 251 , 50 )

Keep going until you have reached the largest possible URL size you expect to encounter. It doesn't hurt if you go to 10,000 characters, since html reduces whitespace automatically.

One drawback is that users cannot copy the entire URL from your table and paste it into a browser. Only the first line gets copied, so they have to copy & paste each line separately.

The example above stops at 300 characters, so if the URL was 450 characters long, the last line would stretch your html table column to 150 characters wide.

[cheezz]

The field with the urls is currently a text field. I use it for sources of information and it may read like:

Found this at the SSDI site <www.socialsecurity.org>

I'm assuming a calculated field would be for number fields only....?

Jane

[Rigsby]

The first thing you need to do (and it’s a good habit to get into) is to split the information in your databases. So, for example:

Found this at the SSDI site www.socialsecurity.org as one field is a bad idea. Here you should be using 2 fields: <URL> and <COMMENTS> which would then be:

www.socialsecurity.org // Found this at the SSDI site

So in 2 fields.

Another thing to try is to make a difference between URL’s and servers. So foe example you might have the entries:

http://www.socialsecurity.org http://www.socialsecurity.org/index http://www.socialsecurity.org/sitemap http://www.socialsecurity.org/whatsnew http://www.socialsecurity.org/whatsnew/products http://www.socialsecurity.org/whatsnew/products/handbags

or whatever.

The trick here is to use PatternCount to find the first single “/” and to split the URL’s from there. You then only need to store the actual server (http://www.socialsecurity.org) once. You can then enter your different endings (after the “/” either in a range of repeating fields, or I would recommend using a related database. So your solution would look something like this:

Server: http://www.socialsecurity.org

Server IP: 192.168.0.568

Links: (In a portal) Comments:

/index Found this at the SSDI site

/sitemap Some interesting stuff here

/whatsnew Out of date but cheap

etc., etc., etc. etc., etc., etc.

I hope this starts to help you. This is only a suggestion for how you could go about things – play around with it, and let me know what you come up with.

Rigsby

PS: Calculating fields are not only for number fields – FM can calculate just about everything

[cheezz]

Hi Rigsby,

Some of what you have here makes sense, but all I know about FM I've taught myself and I know nothing about PatternCount, repeating fields, or portals. Also, I already have upwards of 5,000 records so I can't begin to separate them now - just the thought makes me shudder!!

Thanks for trying to help - I'm going to have to do some playing around with a practice database and see if I can figure some of this stuff out - that repeating field would sure be nice.....

Jane