Left or Right usage

[TomLon]

I have a field (for instance nName)that stores a persons name (Steve Jones). In another field, I need to extract the person's first inital and last name (sjones). What formula would I use to extract that?

This is going to be part of a greater solution. I have an application that has to generate a unique record. The format was originially going to QAR-1, QAR-2, QAR-3, etc. That was going to ber a no brainer. Until i was told that this was going to be a replicated database. Hence I do not know if a decent way to issue unique records in a replicated database without having the user replicate after every record. So, I decided to have the unique record comprise of QAR-SJONES-01, QAR-SJONES-02, etc. I assume that with the user having all of their own records locally at any given time, this should be acceptable. Now, form a sort standpoint, is it better to have QAR first or have the usercredentials first?

Now if anyone has a better solution to create a unique value that is numerical, I would love to hear it.

Thank you very much.

 

[DJLuman]

What I did may help you. I separated the first and last name, made them both different fields (fname and lname). The next step may be useless, but I like to seperate functions.

I made a computed text field called fextract whose formula is @left(fname;1). I then created another computed for display text field called uniquename - @Left(fextract+lname;@length(lname+1)). The output of uniquename is the first initial and the whole last name. I hope this helps, and this may even be a little too much for your solution!

Sincerely,
D. Jonathan Luman

 

[TomLon]

Thanks, but I am not sure if I am able to seperate the field as this filed is computed to display the Given Name of the user (the value property = @Name([G];@Author) ) so I am not sure if I can seperate it.

Thanks

 

[pmonett]

@Left(field;1) + @LeftBack(field;" ")

This should work if last names are not composed of several (you know, marriage naming issues) and seperated by spaces instead of dashes.

Pascal.