Question

I have some contract text that may change.

It is currently (non live system) stored in a database field (we determine which contract text to get by using other fields in table). I, however need to display a specific date (based on individual contract) within this text.

IE (but Jan 12, changes depending on the individual contract):

blah blah blah… on Jan 12, 2009… blah blah blah

but everything else in the contract text is the same.

I’m looking for a way to inject the date into this text. Similar to .NET’s

Console.Write("Some text here {0} and some more here", "My text to inject");

Is there something like this? Or am I going to need to split the text into two fields and just concatenate?

I am always displaying this information using Crystal Reports so if I can inject the data in through Crystal then that’s fine.

I am using Crystal Reports, SqlServer 2005, and VB.net.

Answer 1

You could use some “reserved string” (such as the “{0}”) as part of the contract, and then perform a replace after reading from the database.

If there’s no option for this reserved string (for instance, if the contract may contain any type of string characters in any sequence, which I find unlikely), then you’ll probably need to split into 2 text fields