List Manipulation

I love list manipulation. Now we can do so much w/@For and stuff. But in the good ole days, list manipulation was, as Rocky would say, "Kewl"..

List manipulation gives a programmer the ability to simulate arrays and "looping" that used to not be available to Notes Developers. List manipulation is still very useful, and fast. It may be "Cheesy", but I sometimes use it in script w/Evaluate statements.

Here is a something I do all the time..

Lets say you had two fields..

In one field, we'll call Name, we have "Andre Guiard" : "Ben Langhinirichs" : "Chris Byrne" : "Henry Newberry" : "Rocky Oliver"
In the second field, we'll call ApprovalStatus, we have "Approved" : "Rejected" : "Rejected" : "Approved" : "Rejected"

The fields corresponde, so Andre approved the request, Ben and Chris Rejected the request, Henry approved, and finally Rocky Rejected the request.

In a third field, Approvers, we want to list the names of the people who approved, and in a fourth field, Rejecters, we want to list all the names of the people who denied the request.

This is easy with list manipulation:

source := Name + "¥" + ApprovalStatus;
approvalList := Name + "¥" + "Approved";
rejectList := Name + "¥" + "Rejected";
Field Approvers := @Word(@Trim(@Replace(source;rejectList;""));"¥";1);
Field Rejectors := @Word(@Trim(@Replace(source;approvalList;""));"¥";1);

The formula to populate the Approvers field, uses the @Replace function. From the Help database:

@Replace( sourcelist ; fromlist ; tolist )
Parameters
sourcelist
Text list. The list whose values you want to scan.
fromlist
Text list. A list containing the values that you want to replace.
tolist
Text list. A list containing the replacement values.

In our formula, we are comparing the source list to the rejectList, anywhere there is a match, it is replaced with "". Then @Trim is used to remove those null values from the list, and we are left with just Andre Guiard¥Approved and Henry Newbery¥Approved. Then the @Word function is used to parse out just the name part of the list.

Source	rejectList- From	to	Results
Andre Guiard¥Approved Ben Langhinrichs¥Rejected Chris Byrne¥Rejected Henry Newberry¥Approved Rocky Oliver¥Rejected	Andre Guiard¥Rejected Ben Langhinrichs¥Rejected Chris Byrne¥Rejected Henry Newberry¥Rejected Rocky Oliver¥Rejected	""	Andre Guiard¥Approved Henry Newberry¥Approved

To populate the Rejectors field, we use the @Replace function again, this time, the From parameter is set to approvalList. And again, the @Word function to parse out just the name portion of the list.

Source	approvalList- From	to	Results
Andre Guiard¥Approved Ben Langhinrichs¥Rejected Chris Byrne¥Rejected Henry Newberry¥Approved Rocky Oliver¥Rejected	Andre Guiard¥Approved Ben Langhinrichs¥Approved Chris Byrne¥Approved Henry Newberry¥Approved Rocky Oliver¥Approved	""	Ben Langhinrichs¥Rejected Chris Byrne¥Rejected Rocky Oliver¥Rejected