It doesn’t appear that IF() supports text strings. Is there a way to do that? E.g. for an address calculation field, it would be great to do something like this:
ADDRESS1 + “\n” + IF(ADDRESS2 <> “”, ADDRESS2 + “\n”, “”) + CITY + IF(CITY <> “”, “, “, “”) + STATE + ” ” + ZIPCODE
Then you don’t end up with blank lines for Address2, and random commas if there is no address at all.
I would like IF functionality as well if this is possible
Unfortunately the math parser I use doesn’t support IF for text values. In fact, it didn’t even support concatenation of strings with the + operator so I had to add that. It would be good to support text though for the IF statement.
Something new with IF and text strings ?
I try to wrote a formula like IF({text field}=”XYZ”,”XYZ”,”ABC”) and it always returns XYZ
Thanks
Well the IF statement can now return text values, but the actual condition part must still be numeric in nature. I’ll have to work on that.
Joe,
You can get what you want by using the IFEMPTY function instead of an IF function:
ADDRESS1 + “\n” + IFEMPTY(ADDRESS2,””,ADDRESS2+”\n”) + IFEMPTY(CITY,””,CITY+”, “) + STATE + ” ” + ZIPCODE.
That will get rid of the blank line for an empty ADDRESS2, and also get rid of random commas. You’ll still get some spaces and line feeds if the address is completely empty, but they won’t be visible. You can tweak the formula further to avoid those, but I wanted to give you an exact analogue to your formula.
Hope that helps,
Mike
The use of IFEMPTY just covers one particular case, and does not provide a robust set of string tests for the Condition part of the IF statement. I could envision:
IF( string1 [SAME AS] string2, X,Y)
IF( string1 [CONTAINS] string2, X,Y)
IF( string1 [BEGINS WITH] string2, X,Y)
IF( string1 [ISEMPTY], X,Y)
You could also concoct the reverse operators [NOT SAME AS], [DOES NOT CONTAIN], etc, but why bother? All you need to do is reverse X and Y to reverse the logic. You could also argue to eliminate [ISEMPTY], since string1 [SAME AS] “” accomplishes the same thing.
Just some food for thought.
— Mike
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