Hi everyone,

I've had a quick trawl through the forums and can't find an answer
to this so I'm hoping its an easy one and I'm being dull.

We have data which includes an amper character in the middle of the
populated field. i.e ( AB amper CDEF )
When the dynamic box is populated it shows the characters prior to
the amper character and ignores those after i.e ( AB only )

Any suggestions would be grateful

Thanks

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Madasabear,

Angry Bruin,

The reason that is happening is that WF is interpretting it as a variable so you need to fool WF into thinking that it is not!

You could preprocess the data used to populate the combo and use something like STRREP to insert a '|' directly after the & or even change the & to a value of &

I'm sure that you'll receive many other answers to this, and these are just quick thoughts without testing to see if it will work for you.

T

T

Are you creating the dynamic list from the master. If you create a fex that hold the data as xml and link to that it works fine. I have data with ampersands and they work fine in my list boxes.
for example create a fex called mycar.fex and then when you create a listbox dynamic link to the fex mycar.

TABLE FILE CAR
SUM CAR
BY CAR
ON TABLE PCHOLD FORMAT XML
END

Mr. Bear,

I don't do WebFOCUS with GUI tools but your quandary prompted me to look into this commonly annoying problem.

This problem occurs when the & is not separated by a space from the next character - WebFOCUS then looks for a Dialogue Manager variable...

Here's a solution to the problem: append a character to the "displayed value" in the dynamic drop-down - this seems to display the value that contains the & (I don't know why this works, but it does). You have to use a procedure to populate the dynamic drop-down.

Here's what I did to test this:

1) Added a DEFINE to the CAR Master, the sample FOCUS database we all use. This is because Information Builders appears to have made sure that no embedded & characters exist in any of their sample databases.

DEFINE COUNTRY1/A10 = STRREP (10, COUNTRY, 1, 'P', 1, '&', 10, 'A10');

(added to the first segment in the CAR Master, replaces the P in JAPAN with a &)

2) Created a procedure that will populate the dynamic drop-down list box, appending an HTML non-breaking space character to the COUNTRY column (the | [pipe] is there to ensure that WebFOCUS doesn't try looking for a DM variable!) - this could be any character:

DEFINE FILE CAR
COUNTRY1A/A20 = COUNTRY1 | '&|nbsp;';
END
TABLE FILE CAR
PRINT
COUNTRY1A
BY COUNTRY1
ON TABLE PCHOLD AS H1 FORMAT XML
END

- COUNTRY1 becomes the option values of the dynamic drop-down list box (the original value)
- COUNTRY1A becomes the option display values of the dynamic drop-down list box (the value with the appended character)

I hope you can use this - two simple steps:
1) Create a procedure that appends a character to the value used in the drop-down list box (ensuring this is the second of the two required fields in the XML HOLD file)
2) Change the HTML Layout Painter Control Data Source to the procedure

mrguru, I have found that if the embedded & is not separated from the next character by a space (or a pipe, I imagine) the behaviour will be as Mr. Bear described.

JA&AN will display as JA
JA& AN will display as JA& AN

This is whether or not a procedure is used to populate the drop-down list box.

Oh. My data is separated by a space. Thanks.

Many thanks for all your replies , I'll let you know how I get on.
I had already tried the XML version which explains the space quandry.

Thanks again,
Paul

PS for some reason it dropped my name from from the original post ,
but liking the variations on my user name

Me again , Just tested it and it works perfectly.

Thanks Francis for your very clear and distinct advice.

My first post and an excellent response and result ,
as the song goes who could ask for anything more