Re: Currency format

[F. Ricardo, Ph.D.]

Not bad, but doesn't one equally have to set up a metadata management subsystem to add, delete, and change custom properties for each of a field's currency-oriented elements? Still, it may work better, though neither is an elegant solution. Since such calculation functionality is so prone to feature creep, such "hand-wired" approaches soon expand into sustainability nightmares. I would just set up data migration with Excel - get the stack to create an intermediate tab-delim data file, then call Excel to read and process it, then to programmatically output the results, which the MC stack would be awaiting.

We can't use the desirable OLE object model because MC doesn't support it (I would love if anyone else could disprove this, as it would simplify my own existence).

This is not as hairy as it sounds, provided you can live with the assumption that the stack's users have Excel access. MC can do a "Launch Excel with mySignal.xls" -- a previously created file that uses Excel's VBA object model. Excel can do a "workbooks.OpenText(path)" call, which imports a text file, and the processing can be VB code you could have had Excel create a priori by means of the Tools\Macro\Record New Macro... item.

  Geoff Canyon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

At 10:53 AM -0700 10/2/01, F. Ricardo, Ph.D. wrote:
>Now, it does nothing about the "$" prefix, which if absolutely necessary would need implementation in something like the following abominable manner. In apps like Excel, the "$" in cells are not part of the data. Rather they are part of the metadata of a cell, which means that something similar would need to be reflected in MetaCard. Among the 2 options are to store the data in one (hidden) metadata field and to display the "pretty" version of it in another. This means building a 2-field management subsystem. The hidden metadata field would keep a totally different version of the data, for instance,
>
>cellH:A
>cellV:1
>rect:25,50,65,80
>val:25.50
>prefix:$
>name:Net Sales

Instead of using another field, couldn't you simply use custom properties of the field with the data in it?
regards,

Geoff


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Francisco J. Ricardo, Ph.D.

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