@ChadVKealey wrote:
Qty Item Description
2 Laptops Dead old laptops, good for parts
3 Tablets Functional Android tablets
is concatenated into/becomes (again, in one multi-line text field)...
2 | Laptops | Dead old laptops, good for parts <line break>
3 | Tablets | Functional Android tablets
In pseudo-code, what I think needs to happen is:
Split-Into-Columns(Split-Into-Rows(ML-Text-Field,<row-delimiter>),<column-delimiter>)
If I'm understanding, you write a pseudo table into a single field. One thing I'd caution here is that you may encounter caps on how many characters you can have in a single field. For instance, SQL has 4000 max characters.
That said, you'd need an action that upon selecting a record to edit, you'd do something like this:
// Set the selected record.
Set(selectedRecord,ThisItem);
Place the form in the right mode
EditForm(Form1);
ForAll(
// Split the entries by line break
RenameColumns(Split(ThisItem.Column,Char(10)),"Result","TextInEachLine"),
Collect(repeatingSection,
{
// Split up the text in a line by the pipe. Get the nth result to represent each column.
Qty: Last(FirstN(Split(TextInEachLine,"|"),1)).Result,
Item: Last(FirstN(Split(TextInEachLine,"|"),2)).Result,
Description: Last(FirstN(Split(TextInEachLine,"|"),3)).Result
}
)
)
So I'm splitting each line of text in the multi-line text field. Char(10) is a line break. If it's not recognized, there's a few other methods to try. MatchAll is more powerful and may be needed depending on how you do linebreaks.
Then I split the text in each line by the pipes to determine the content for each column I actually want to collect.
Split creates a table of the things separated by pipes. FirstN gets n rows, but you want only the last one in that subset, so you use Last. This is how to get the nth row. It's a nice pattern because the structure is very similar, you just change 1, 2, 3... n for the order of your columns.
Let me know if you need further guidance on this.
