Hi everyone,
  I was wondering if there was a good way to have it so that if hyphens are added to a field, they are automatically stripped out. I have a field where people could sometimes use hyphens in it and we want, for consistency sake, to have it without the hyphens. It's a simple text field in which this needs to happen.

Thanks,
Arholly

You can use a mask and then store the text without hyphens. If this is an SSN or phone number field, the mask will give you the option of storing the text without the hyphens.

Alternatively, you can parse the fields and remove the hyphens, but you would want to run this process off peak. You could also put in business rules that if a hyphen is found Before Insert or Before Update, the user would be warned to remove the hyphens and the record would not be kept.

HTH

mmcdonal

I prefer MMcDonal's mask idea best. If you don't use that you can also use something like the REPLACE function in the field's After Update event, e.g. Me.txtField = Replace(Me.txtField, "-", "")


Greg Serrano
Michigan Dept. of Environmental Quality, Air Quality Division