Quick snippet: Show first n characters of a string without cutting words in half with OWS

Just a quickie for those of you who use the free Open Web Studio DNN RAD environment: I needed to show only the first n characters of a string that I got via a query in OWS, but wanted to “stop” display at the end of a word, (that is, not being very strict on the n character limit).

 

If our field is, for example, called “description” and the character limit is, let’s say, 100, and we need to insert three dots (…) after the end of the string if it’s only part of the original, here’s the function (be sure to write it on a single line):

 

{IIF, "[FORMAT,"[description]", {LENGTH}]>100", "[FORMAT,"[description]", {LEFT:[FORMAT,"[FORMAT, "[description]", {LEFT:100}]",{LASTINDEXOF: }]}]...","[description]"}

 

Change the field name, the number of characters and the three dots at the end to whatever suits you.

 

Of course there are several ways to achieve that via your SQL query itself, but that’s a quick way to do it in OWS if you can’t modify the query (when you’re using a view that is used somewhere else, for example).

 

Enjoy.