Hi Howard, you said: "I wasn't able to tell that the DisplayFormat property of dbgrid did anything at all. Is this documented anywhere?
And apparently, there is no EditFormat property at all. What I want to do is some rudimentary validation, e.g., make sure a zipcode is exacty five characters long and all characters are digits. How do I do that in a Lazarus/FPC dbgrid?" you could use a try...except block to attempt to convert the number to an integer, this would tell if it is wrong, length could be achieved with length(inputstring) , it should also work with UTF-8 as numbers are a single byte subset of the UTF-8 encoding system, I wouldnt like to try it for text length on non latin text though Why limit yourself to zip codes though, an application should have a more international appeal A british postcode is like this B1 24NJ, CV21 3HB If your using Zeos database components, specifically the table component, the field events onGetText & OnSetText could be a good place to do your checking By having a mask field in the country table it should be possible to set the country first then match the postcode, this is the approach I am taking I have extensive lists in MySql on ZIP codes, countries, province/state, cities etc. which I have no objection to sharing I am also working on an address book project Basically it is being designed with Lazarus 0.9.25 beta for the UTF-8 support Database is MySql using Zeos database components The address lists are being built to show address information in dual language format, so China shows in English & Chinese, Israel in English & Hebrew The real kicker though is in connecting it over the net to exchange non-personal address data with a central server So if you enter the Hebrew translation for Tel-Aviv it will become available to all other users worldwide I already have Chinese provinces in Chinese! Thanks to US policy I have fairly complete lists on US postcodes & Cities but limited for other countries at the moment I want to be able to print an envelope in 2 languages where appropriate & I want to do it when I can't even read the other language I intend to also create a set of components to let others use this address book as a component within a project, for example accounts programs I would of course welcome any help with this project I personally dont intend to change from MySql as the database is already shared with web design code, having said that, I would welcome the ability to support differing database types within the application You can find the lists of countries at http://comchatter.com/nlso/geodata.php, it is part of a much larger internationalization support project _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
