'Memo' field - professional way of large text field

shogan@mila.ie

Hi all,

Quick question:

What is the professional way of representing 1024 characters of text in a field for a record?

Which methods are 'future-proof'?

I am building a table that will be taking data from an Excel sheet, and two comment 'fields' (columns) can contain more than 1000 characters: the file is quite important for our business and I'd like to know what methods employed will be supported in the future, as I am trying to bring all 'satellite' systems critical to the running of our company into NAV.

I am looking at text-editors that link into NAV, splicing multiple text fields, BIGTEXT and BLOBS. What do the professionals recommend?

I may look for help from respondents on the coding implementations


Thanks,
Stephen

Savatage

We use Waldopad:
http://www.mibuso.com/dlinfo.asp?FileID=335

mdPartnerNL

Would love to use an editor in which you can use bold, font size, etc. Where the data is save in html text.

shogan@mila.ie

Hi Harry,

I've looked at WaldoPad and it seems like a little overkill plus a little clumsy for the end-user.

Doing a little more research - what I am looking for is the equivalent of the "Memo" datatype of MS Access...

...and I think I may have found it. Kind of.

        BLOB objects of property subtype "Memo".

This is going to be a little messy, as even when it is like this I cannot type directly into the table. I am guessing like with every BLOB field I have come across the data needs to be streamed to it.

So I am guessing that on a form, if my "memo" field is updated, some trigger will need to read the text within the field and stream it to the BLOB field in the table.

Would I be getting warm?


Regards,
Stephen

shogan@mila.ie

Well I have some good news

Thanks to this blog entry: http://techblog.byllemos.com/2008/03/strings-larger-then-250-characters/

... and this Mibuso post http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=14169&hilit=blob+bigtext

I have managed to create code behind two buttons - one to set a text variable into the BLOB field (of "Memo" subtype"), and then another button to retrieve it, and set an unbound textbox on the form to the contents (as well as a MESSAGE prompt!).

*Proud!* :idea:

Tomorrow I'll see how much data I can assign to the variable, and try to read from the "memo" unbound field on the form into the table.

(Quite enjoying this learning process!).

I am marking the subject of this post SOLVED but I am not officially marking it as SOLVED as I may have a few more questions about the form's textbox field interacting with a BLOB-Memo table field.

Hope no-one minds!


Regards,
Stephen