Ever been building a dynamic URL in your RTF template and when it renders you get some interesting prefixes to the URL you were expecting?
MSWord is good at that, its a 'nanny' application and knows what is best for you, now take your medicine like a good little 'templater'. Most popular is the 'C:Documents and Settingstdexter' prefix - nice, just what you need. We discovered another one today, the FSG folks are looking into providing a means to drill down on FSG numbers back into the appropriate GL ledger - its going to be a very neat solution that will add a whole new level of interactivity to FSG reports with Publisher. We had to learn how to ignore Nanny first thou ...
To create the URLs to the correct account they need to build it up using some of the data elements around the number element:
<fsg:RptLine RptCnt="p1001" RowCnt="r100002" LinCnt="l100122">
<fsg:RptCell ColCnt="c1000" RealNum="">Totaled 01-01 </fsg:RptCell>
<fsg:RptCell ColCnt="c1001" RealNum="0.000000">0.00</fsg:RptCell>
<fsg:RptCell ColCnt="c1002" RealNum="2685057669.910000">2,685,057,669.91</fsg:RptCell>
<fsg:RptCell ColCnt="c1003" RealNum="0.000000">0.00</fsg:RptCell>
To build the URL we need RptCnt, RowCnt, LinCnt, etc ... straightforward right. Well it would be if Word did not want to help you so much. The values we are interested in are attributes and therefore we reference those with an '@' sign e.g. @RptCnt. See, even my blog software thinks it knows best, putting a mailto link on the '@' - there it goes again!
When we built reportthe URL in MSWord we got a great 'mailto:' prefix on our URLs - no matter how many auto complete switches we turned off- Nanny Word was there to correct us like a 'dogged' school teacher determined to make you spell 'colour' as 'color' cos we're in America, or maybe 'favourite' as 'favorite' and the best transatlantic transgression - 'sulfur' instead of the correct British 'sulphur'. 'Sulfur' seems so '1st grade' - flame me if you will, its a pet peeve. Another reason for hating Word's nannying tendencies - it's America-English dictionary - yes, I could switch it to British-English but seeing as the majority of my internal docs are headed US based eyes I have to live with it. Right, back from rant land - we create URLs in our template like:
http://{servername}/fsg/?callfunct=XXXX&code={../@RptCnt}{../@RowCnt}{@ColCnt}
and because of those @'s we get the following in the output:
mailto:http://tdexter-us.us.orac.com/fsg/?callFunct=XXXX&code=1223|434343|34322|232
That 'mailto:' really screws things up arrrrgggghhh ... its done it again! Here's the solution, just put the URL in and let Nanny help you.Now when you have the document infront of you press Alt-F9 - this will toggle the field codes in the document and you can remove the offending mailto from the HYPERLINK field.
{HYPERLINK"mailto:%7b/MasterReport/fsg:HostName%7d?DRILLDOWN_ACTION=0&DRILL_DOCUMENT_ID=%7b/MasterReport/fsg:ReqId%7d&DRILL_DOCUMENT_NODE=%7b../@RptCnt%7d%7b../@RowCnt%7d%7b../@LinCnt%7d%7b./@ColCnt%7d"}
press Alt-F9 again and your URLs will be evaluated correctly at runtime. Be sure not to get caught by 'Nanny' or you'll get detention!
