Getting Error Message using Formatted Search

Question

Hi,
I am using formatted search for validating a particular field, and that happens fine.  Kindly let me know if I can also display error messages using the same formatted search.
If yes, what am I to include in the formatted search, and if No, please let me know the alternative.
Thanks in advance.
Satish.

Answer 1

Hi Satish,
if you validate the value of a field and intend to rise an error message on detection of invalid values in a separate window or in the status line there is no way to do it with Formatted Searches (as far as I know)!
You could use the following methods as simple workarounds if you don't want to program a solution with the SDK:
1. Solution
You can display the text of an error message in the field you validate; of course, the invalid data then is overwritten with your error message, but you could construct the message from fixed text parts concatenated with the data found in the field.
Be sure to save the original data of the field in your query before you do anything else. This way you sustain the field data in case the data is valid!
Example:
DECLARE @save AS ....
SET @save = $[xxxxx]
IF $[xxxxx] test on invalid data
  SELECT 'Error: Invalid data: ' + $[xxxxx] -- in case of error
ELSE
  SELECT $[xxxxx] -- no error - sustain valid data
END
2. Solution:
You define a sepate User Defined Field (UDF) for potential error messages - that's the way I often programmed it for our own applications. Suppose that the Formatted Search is connected to this UDF and the field to validate is field 'xxxxx'. The Formatted Search is triggered (auto-refresh) on change of field 'xxxxx':
IF $[xxxxx] test on invalid data
  SELECT 'Error: Invalid data: ' + $[xxxxx] -- in case of error
END
May be that there are minor syntactical errors or missing type conversions in the code above - but I hope it gives you an idea on how to solve your problem without SDK programming!
Good luck!
Frank Romeni