SAP- Lesson 4

Overview of Built-In Functions

The Formula Workshop in Crystal Reports gives you the ability to write very powerful formulas. In addition to writing your own formulas, Crystal Reports has dozens of built-in functions that decrease the amount of work you have to do.

String Functions

The ability to modify and concatenate strings is a powerful feature of many programming languages, and Basic syntax doesn't disappoint. This section breaks out the different categories of string functions and summarizes how they work. The categories are: Analyzing a String, Parsing Strings, and Manipulating Strings.
Throughout this section, many of the functions listed use one or both of the arguments called compare and start.
The compare argument determines when string comparisons are supposed to be case sensitive. If compare is 0, the search is case-sensitive. If it is 1, the search is not case-sensitive.
The compare argument is optional. If it is left out, the comparison defaults to 0 (case sensitive).
The start argument tells the function to process characters starting at a specified position. Any characters that are prior to that position are ignored. This argument is optional. If it is left out, then the function is performed for the entire string.

Converting Data Types

Basic syntax is a type safe language that requires all constants and variables in the same formula to be of the same data type. It also requires you to pass constants and variables as arguments using the exact data type that the formula expects. Even though the data types in Basic syntax are fairly simple, you still have to make sure that they are compatible. Fortunately, this shouldn't cause problems because there are functions to convert between the different data types.

Conversion Function	Description
CBool(number), CBool(currency)	Convert to Boolean.
CCur(number), CCur(string)	Convert to Currency.
CDbl(currency), CDbl(string), CDbl(boolean)	Convert to Number. Equivalent to ToNumber(). See the section  Formatting Values for Output .
CStr()	Convert to String. Equivalent to ToText().
CDate(string), CDate(year, month, day), CDate(DateTime)	Convert to Date.
CTime(string), CTime(hour, min, sec), CDate(DateTime)	Convert to Time.
CDateTime(string), CDateTime(date), CDateTime(date, time), CDateTime(year, month, day)	Convert to DateTime.
CDateTime(year, month, day, hour, min, sec)	Convert to DateTime.
ToNumber(string), ToNumber(boolean)	Convert to a Number.
ToText()	Convert to String. Same as CStr().
IsDate(string), IsTIme(), IsDateTime()	Test a string for being a valid date/time.
IsNumber(string)	Test a string for being a valid number.
ToWords(number), ToWords(number, decimals)	Convert a number to its word equivalent.