I have a calculated text field which is part of an invoice printout.
The definition is as follows:

Case ( WeeklyRental > 0 ; "Includes " & Weeks & " weeks rental. After "
& Weeks & " weeks rental will be charged at £" & Round (WeeklyRental;2
) & " per week"; "" )

This shows in an invoice to specify rental amounts after a certain
number of weeks. I want this statement to completely disappear in other
invoices where no rental is to be charged. As it is it works fine
except - the weekly rental does not format properly as currency. So for
example £30.20 comes out as £30.2. Is there any simple way to make this
format properly as currency? The rental is a percentage and can have
more that 2 decimal places.
--
Dan Fretwell
Using FMP7.03 on WinXP SP2

In article <xn0e4kf6voahov000 (AT) news (DOT) freenetname.co.uk>, dan (AT) owlsnet (DOT) co.uk
says...
So far so good.

Simple? Depends on what you mean by simple.

Anyhow... rewriting it a bit... using if instead of case... (Why would
you use a "case" here?)

There are about a million ways to acheive what you want to do. A simple
'hack' would be:


If ( WeeklyRental > 0 ;

Let (
[hack = Round(WeeklyRental;2)+0.005;
formattedrate = left(hack,length(hack)-1)];

"Includes " & Weeks & " weeks rental. " &
"After " & Weeks & " weeks rental will be charged at £" &
formattedrate &
" per week"
);

"")

The hack turns what ever your number is... e.g. 30.2 to 30.201, and then
returns all the characters except the last one... e.g. 30.20. Because
the 0.005 is added on after the rounding is finished, you can rest
assured it won't alter the value.

If your doing this a lot, FM7 Developer's custom definable functions
make this much cleaner, and less prone to typos and other errors.

And If you don't have FM7 at all you can do it equivalently without let,
its just a little less readable:

If ( WeeklyRental > 0 ;

"Includes " & Weeks & " weeks rental. " &
"After " & Weeks & " weeks rental will be charged at £" &
left(
Round(WeeklyRental;2)+0.005,
length(Round(WeeklyRental;2)+0.005)-1) &
" per week";

"")

-regards,
Dave

In article <MPG.1d3a53757cf20aac989bdf (AT) shawnews (DOT) vf.shawcable.net>, 42
<nospam (AT) nospam (DOT) com> wrote:

WOW!! There IS another person on the planet who uses the 'If' statement
when there's only one or two possible result ... everyone else seems
stuck on using 'Case' all the time. Poor old 'If' will become a
nostalgic memory soon. (


Anyway, there's two problems with your solution which may or may not
bother the original person:

A. Negative numbers get rounded towards zero rather then the
correct way.
eg. -9.9965 becomes -9.99 instead of -10.00
In fact, "-0.9" does somthing funny and displays as "-.89"
(probably because it's adding 0.005 rather than subtracting
for negative numbers).

B. Numbers between 1 and 0 won't display the leading 0.
eg. 0.9865 displays as .99

We did go through something similar to this a little while back for
displaying numbers in scientific format (eg. 1.95E+04) and came to the
conclusion that it's not as easy as it looks to round and format
numbers within a calculation. We did come up with a couple of different
formulas that appeared to work, but were very complicated.




Helpful Harry
Hopefully helping harassed humans happily handle handiwork hardships ;o)

Thanks to both 42 and HH

42 - as you say it depends what "simple" means and your solution is
much simpler than the way I was going - thanks.

HH - The reason for the Case is that I have been experimenting with
"dynamic" instructions to the user when entering data and this needs a
Case. I implemented this one as a Case as I may what I want to change
the text according to other situations (i.e. replace with something
else under certain extra conditions and nothing under others).
Regarding your comments on negatives, that will not happen here as the
WeeklyRental, if not zero, is a percentage of a positive amount and I
think the smallest non-zero it is likely to have is of the order of 2.5.

<SNIP>



--
Dan Fretwell
Using FMP7.03 on WinXP SP2

In article <100720051805316195%helpful_harry (AT) nom (DOT) de.plume.com>,
helpful_harry (AT) nom (DOT) de.plume.com says...
It is essentially a shortcut for case. And with FM syntax its only a
shortcut by two characters. But still when reading someone elses code if
tells me there is only one case to look at, while case doesn't.

Yeah, I called it a 'hack' for a reason.

I assumed rental rate would never be less than zero.
Tweaking it to add/subtract for sign though is as simple as making it:

Round(WeeklyRental;2)+(0.005*if(sign(weeklyrental) <0),-1,1))

The leading 0 is less a bug and more a separate part of the initial
problem I didn't tackle. And again the range 0-1 might not even be in
the problem space. At any rate adding it back is fairly simple: detect
if weeklyrental is between 0 and 1 and add a leading 0, or between 0 and
-1 and insert a zero at the second character (or strip off the first
character and add "-0").

I remember it; I was actually involved in that one too. (or at least
i've been involved in one recently here... im sure its come up more than
once)

-Dave

In article <slrndd7jh5.pdp.t-use (AT) ID-685 (DOT) user.individual.de>, t-
use (AT) gmx (DOT) net says...
For a single case:

case (
a=b, c
d)

if (
a=b, c
d)

How does the case line up better?

42 wrote:
Just to throw my two cents in. I used to use If() whenever I could, but
have since made the effort to always use Case(). Why? Because Case()
always works and If() doesn't -- consistency. Also because If()
requires two (and only two) results. With Case(), I can say: Case(A, B)
and I find it to be cleaner and easier to read then If(A, B, "")

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Howard Schlossberg (818) 883-2846
FM Pro Solutions Los Angeles, California

FileMaker 7 Certified Developer
Associate Member, FileMaker Solutions Alliance

On Sun, 10 Jul 2005 18:14:09 GMT, 42 wrote:
Technically, in the world of programming "If" came long before "Case".
So "Case" is really a shortcut for multiple "If"s. )

Helpful Harry
Hopefully helping harassed humans happily handle handiwork hardships ;o)

In article <slrndd9lk6.pth.t-use (AT) ID-685 (DOT) user.individual.de>, Martin
Trautmann <t-use (AT) gmx (DOT) net> wrote:

That won't work in older versions of FileMaker Pro, but I'm not sure
which version added the ability to not use the "else" / "otherwise"
part of the If statement.

I've just tried it in a FileMaker 5.5 Calculation field and you get the
"two few separators" error.

'If' I get to the Mac with FileMaker 6 later today, 'then' I might try
it on that version, 'otherwise' I won't. ;o)



Helpful Harry
Hopefully helping harassed humans happily handle handiwork hardships ;o)

In article <140720050902002529%helpful_harry (AT) nom (DOT) de.plume.com>,
helpful_harry (AT) nom (DOT) de.plume.com says...
That was his point. You -can't- do if(a,b), but you can case(a,b)

His thesis is that this difference makes case better than if. I'm not
entirely convinced myself but I see where he's coming from.