How to avoid the dots in a crowded form?

Business Central/NAV Developers Forum
1

Hi, don’t know if it’s possible, but have a look at this. I’m looking for any way to avoid those little dots that appear after the field content when it doesn’t fit the row. Alas these dots take up much of the screen space than I have. The red box marks how I want it to look. Only the field that has the cursor is displayed without the dots. Here the date is cut off at the end, but the important bits are visible. Failed attempt: The field content is mostly date and time, so the information of year and second is not needed. I tried setting the MaxLength-Property of the rows to “5” - still more than 5 characters are displayed. Do I have to live with this or dows anyone know some clever way to free up the blocked screen space? Regards Martin

2

You could try using the OnFormat trigger on those fields in the form, to only show the First 5 or so characters?

3

Something like this maybe Text := Copystr(format(“Date field”),1,5);

4

Great tip. That works. The even lazier Text:=COPYSTR(Text,1,5) works, too. Thanks.

5

But this way when a User resizes the column they will never see the whole content of the field! Maybe you should try to find a relationship between the no. of characters to display and the CurrForm.Control.WIDTH property, meaning that the bigger the WIDTH, the bigger the no. of characters displayed.

6

quote:

But this way when a User resizes the column they will never see the whole content of the field! Maybe you should try to find a relationship between the no. of characters to display and the CurrForm.Control.WIDTH property, meaning that the bigger the WIDTH, the bigger the no. of characters displayed.

This is a also good idea. In our case this won’t be needed as the user is not supposed to resize anything. I ran into another problem, though: Normally the full value of the field content is displayed in the lower left corner of the screen. When I shorten the value in the field, the lower left value gets shortened as well so there’s no chance to see the full value. Note that you can see the full field name instead of the shortened caption I use in the table This is not a problem for time/date fields I have, but will be one for option fields.