Carriage Return after 75

[rellis32]

I am working on a database that will send meeting requests in the icalendar format. I have had great success, mostly, but i am having problems with the DESCRIPTION part of the ical. The ical standards state that the DESCRIPTION must only be 75 characters long at a time, meaning i need a return after 75 bytes of data, wether it be spaces, numbers whatever.

Is it possible to have filemaker do this? Meaning count 75 characters insert the carriage return, cout 75 more, etc...

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm beating my head against a wall here.

TIA

Bob

[Søren Dyhr]

http://www.briandunning.com/cf/74

--sd

[Lee Smith]

Take a look at these files:

By Bob Weaver

and this one

iCal filter

HTH

Lee

[Ender]

Welcome Bob,

How about something like:

case(length(Description) > 75; left(Description;75) & ¶ & right(Description; length(Description) - 75); Description)

Although, there are a couple limitations: First, the line breaks at the 75th character, even if it's in the middle of a word. Second, it doesn't solve the problem for lines over 150 characters. If these are problems, then a custom function may be required. Let us know.

[rellis32]

Thank you all for your input. After roughly 50 tries I came up with this

Let(

[

tf = Substitute(Event_Description;¶;"n") & "n"; //Change to whatever text field being used

len = Length (tf)];

Case ( len ≤ 75 ; tf;

len ≤ 150 ; Left (tf ; 75) & "¶" & Middle (tf ; 76 ; len - 75) ;

len ≤ 225 ; Left (tf ; 75)& "¶" & Middle (tf ; 76 ; 75) & "¶" & Right (tf ; len - 150) ;

len ≤ 300 ; Left (tf ; 75)& "¶" & Middle (tf ; 76 ; 75 )&"¶" & Middle (tf ; 151 ; 75 )& "¶" & Right (tf ; len -225)

It seems outlook needs a hard carriage return to accept any data over 75 characters long, and it needs an n to format a return.

this somewhat limits me to what i can put in the text field, unless i want to keep going with the calculation. I am curious if the aformentioned custom function could be changed to give the hard carriage return. I'm not sure if this is even allowed, changing someones function, if it isn't, please forgive me for asking. If it's ok, could i get some input on what i might need to change?

Thank You!

Bob

[Søren Dyhr]

I'm not sure if this is even allowed, changing someones function, if it isn't, please forgive me for asking.

It's actually a very good question since nothing like this is mentioned on Brian Dunnings site:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

...however would I be honest to admit that I make changes in them if I feel the urge for it.

Before we dig deeper in your customization, should you perhaps read this thread as well:

http://clevelandconsulting.com/support/viewtopic.php?t=230&sid=d469894e090792b0464088f8121482b6

Due to the different aspects they're debating!

--sd

[rellis32]

That's the first time I have seen that Free Software Definition! Good Stuff! As far as the Cleveland Consulting function, it looks like that may work, I am assuming I can assign a "?" ? being a carriage return, to the Prefix ?? Thank you for your help!

Bob

[Lee Smith]

I'm sure that the author used /? because the ¶ (Pilcrow) doesn't always show as expected in the forums.

Why not just run it through a text editor and replace the /? with the ¶ (Pilcrow) and then paste it into the Custom Function?

HTH

Lee

[comment]

The custom functions mentioned here are attempting to hard wrap text at appropriate break points (with varying degrees of success...).

It seems you are more interested in forcing a new line after exactly 75 characters, no matter what - so you can make it much simpler:

ForceWrap ( text ; columnWidth )

Let ( [

line = Left ( text ; columnWidth ) ;

nextText = Right ( text ; Length ( text ) - columnWidth )

] ;

line

&

Case (

Length ( nextText ) ;

¶ & ForceWrap ( nextText ; columnWidth )

)

)

Replace the paragraph symbol ¶ with whatever string you need as line delimiter.

[rellis32]

I gave this a shot, this is what outlook received

Notes:n----------------------------------------nOn 1/10/2006 =

at 10:=B6 14:18 PM - Adminn this is a testn

the = and =B6 are where the carriage returns should be, i can't figure out why it is formating them like this???

This is the Function being used for this data:

Let ( [

line = Left ( text ; columnWidth ) ;

nextText = Right ( text ; Length ( text ) - columnWidth )

] ;

line

&

Case (

Length ( nextText ) ;

"¶ " & Forcewrap ( nextText ; columnWidth )

)

)

I have tried with quotes, without quotes.... It looks exactly like the output from the calculation above in filemaker, it is just being sent diffrently.

confused....

Bob

[comment]

Why don't you give us the entire chain from input to output (Outlook?)? I am guessing the problem is in between applications - Filemaker uses a special symbol for in-field paragraph breaks. You can verify this by trying with a regular text field containing multiple lines, each no more that 75 characters.

[rellis32]

Ok, here goes:

When i pre call a customer i put the notes in the notes field. This is the field i'm working with.

I am using SMTPit pro to send Content-Type=text/calendar to the installer using the icalendar format, so the field that i am using as the email body looks like this;

BEGIN:VCALENDAR

PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//outlook 11.0 MIMEDIR//EN

VERSION:2.0

METHOD:REQUEST

BEGIN:VEVENT

ATTENDEE;CN="()";ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;RSVP=TRUE:MAILTO:

ORGANIZER:MAILTO:[email protected]

DTSTART:600220T760000Z

DTEND:600220T760000Z

LOCATION:edited

TRANSP:OPAQUE

SEQUENCE:0

UID:1032839

DTSTAMP:20060111T193839Z

DESCRIPTION: Notes:n----------------------------------------nOn 1/10/2006 at 10:14:18¶ PM - Adminn this is a testn

SUMMARY:edited

PRIORITY:3

X-MICROSOFT-CDO-IMPORTANCE:1

CLASS:PUBLIC

END:VEVENT

END:VCALENDAR

The problem child is the DESCRIPTION part. Some of these are formatted dynamically and some are constant, depending on the information. But, the DESCRIPTION, and I quote,

Lines of text SHOULD NOT be longer than 75 octets, excluding the line

break. Long content lines SHOULD be split into a multiple line

representations using a line "folding" technique. That is, a long

line can be split between any two characters by inserting a CRLF

immediately followed by a single linear white space character (i.e.,

SPACE, US-ASCII decimal 32 or HTAB, US-ASCII decimal 9). Any sequence

of CRLF followed immediately by a single linear white space character

is ignored (i.e., removed) when processing the content type.

So basically, as long as i keep the description to under 75, all is well, but in reallity, these will often times be over 1000 characters long.

If you look at the calculation above, i think my second post, this works, for information under 300 characters long. I can continue the calculation, make it as long as I want, I guess, I just didn't think this was a very efficient way of doing it.

I am somewhat confused by the fact that this calculation works, but the custom function above did not, when put side by side in seperate fields, they look identical, but obviously they're not.

Thank you all for your time and effort in this!

Bob

[comment]

I used the calc in your post #189673 above for one field.

In the other field, I have this:

ForceWrap ( Substitute ( Text ; ¶ ; "n" ) & "n" ; 75 )

The Forcewrap CF is modified to use "¶" (as in your post #189755 above).

Using the Exact() function for comparison, the two results are identical.

[rellis32]

This is GREAT! It works perfectly, I can't believe I didn't try this combination, but no matter, it works now.

Thank you all for your help, much appreciated!

Bob

[rellis32]

false alarm,user error :B

Edited January 12, 2006 by Guest