MedLook Weekly Tip For 10/10/2005

Last time we looked at printing the patient's name in a custom report. This time we're going to look a little closer at some more special formatting you can do with the custom reports (and later with labels). First, recall that the [] characters are used to enclose all special tokens and that these are case sensitive. So [LastName] will be replaced by the selected patient's last name. Since there is always a need to have some special formatting we have some built-in features that apply to all tokens. In this case we're going to simply show by example how each of these work. Let's use WorkPhone (work phone) as the token with the actual phone number being the REM sales line of 18005486148. Note that the double quotes are used only to show what would be replaced (i.e. spaces, etc.) but the quotes themselves would not actually be part of the replacement.

So a space immediately before the right brace, ], allows for an optional space to print. If there is no data, in this case no work phone, then the entire token is replaced with nothing.

The "\n" allows for a carriage return to break to a new line.

The L4 is actually L# where # is anything greater than 0. L is for left and R is for right. In each case the # is for the number of characters to replace from either the left or right side of the string. Using L and R allows for fixed width column formatting without using tables.

Next time we'll look at the patient summary in a little more detail as we continue to learn how to use the custom reports.

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