MedLook Weekly Tip For 10/03/2005

Continuing with the Custom Reports we're going to look a little more in depth at the dictionary of terms available and how to use them. To begin, let's call each dictionary term a token. Tokens are items that are replaceable by the actual data stored in the database. The patient's name is a good place to begin because it's relatively simply, yet demonstrates most of the features we need to get started. As we have already seen the patient's name consists of four basic parts: title, first name, middle initial, and last name (see page 217 of the manual). The example from last time is shown below.

     Patient:     [Title ] [FirstName] [MI. ] [LastName]

Note that each token is enclosed by the left and right braces []. It is also important to observe that the tokens are case sensitive so you must have the exact upper/lower case sense on each token. Notice that the title (i.e. Mr., Mrs., etc.) has a space before the right bracket. This simply means that if there is a title it will always have a following space separating it and the information immediately to its right. This allows us to print nicely aligned names with and without titles, e.g. "Billy Barstow" or "Mr. Billy Barstow". We don't want something to print as " Billy Barstow" because that makes for mal-aligned and clumsy looking data.

Next, the first name field is simply shown as [FirstName]. The F and N must be in upper case with everything else in lower case. There is NO SPACE between First and Name. The last name is handled in the same way.

The middle initial is interesting. It is abbreviated as MI but is shown here as [MI. ]. This allows us to print the middle initial with a "." after it and a space. If there is no middle initial neither the "." or space will print. So this allows us to print as "Billy Barstow" if there is no middle initial or "Billy B. Barstow" if there is a middle initial. If we formatted the line as "[FirstName] [MI]. [LastName]" and there was no middle initial then the name would print as "Billy . Barstow". That just doesn't look very nice.

Lastly, we could have done the following:

To get:

    Barstow, Billy B.

If there was no last name (which should always be present, but this is just for example), we would have:

    Billy B.

If we had formatted this as:

    [LastName], [FirstName] [MI. ]

And there was no last name we would have gotten:

    , Billy B.

That just wouldn't look right.

We'll look at some more formatting in the next issue.

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