Streamserve: Utilizing Its Strengths

One of my favorite things about being a Streamserve Consultant is sometimes I get to do short, high-value projects. Most often, these mini-projects—which take less than a day to complete—involve implementing a formatting remedy for the sloppiness of the earlier design work. So aside from being able to fix these issues from the comfort of my office chair, the greatest aspect is the high customer satisfaction achieved.

The one I just finished is a prime example. Using a function in the PageOut, I concatenated multiple lines pulled from a StreamIN input which comprised the Terms and Conditions text. Then when it is output in an field configured as "Auto-wrap", it looks like someone typed it in using Microsoft Word rather than piped it in from a legacy ERP. That was how it looked before because basically the implementer pulled it in a pushed it out "as-is". Here's the short StreamServe scripting statement I used to make it look professional:

$t_and_c_fmt = subStrRepl($t_and_c, HexStr("<0A>"), " ");

I set the variable $t_and_c_fmt up and suppressed the output of the one which had been pulled in ($t_and_c). The subStrRepl function substitutes a space for newline characters. And that is pretty much all it takes, other than resizing the box correctly which was another part of the request.

In the midst of this project, I was asked a common question by the client. "Should we change the formatting of the text as we are sending it?" My answer was emphatically negative. Always use StreamServe for what it does best! You paid for it, and chances are that at least one person in upper management groaned at the price tag. Must people don't use StreamServe for even one fourth of what it is capable of doing. A good example of that will probably be my next project which involves Streamserve SMS implementation. You did know Streamserve did text messages, didn't you?

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Email: paul.fry@flexresourcing.com
Phone: 216-496-9915