formating in crystal reports

How to suppress the display of a template field or the text field in crystal report on its value being NULL or empty string.

This works only for numbers, it was not possible for me to do so for strings.

Can anybody help me in this regard.

This is a forum for discussion of SQL Server Reporting Services, not Crystal Reports...you might get lucky, but I don't think anyone will be able to answer your question here. Try the businessobjects website and see if they have some sort of public forum system -- I bet you'll have better responses there?

Format Masking for creating leading periods

Is there an elegant way to fill the empty space leading a textbox in a table with periods, similar to a table of contents effect?

When I do not allow the textbox to grow and just append a long string of periods it looks fine in my report preview, but after I deploy everything appended after the primary field in that text box is missing?

My report has a lot of data to the right but it is collapsible so the fields to the left are a good distance away. This is why I am trying to include light visual aids that assist lining up data values. I am not stuck on the leading period idea but it seems the least cluttered.

AaronBump...
Does anyone have any solutions for masking fields?|||

Hello Aaron,

Can you try something like this in your field's expression:

=StrDup(25 - len(Fields!FIELD1.Value), ".") & Fields!FIELD1.Value

The 25 in my example would have to be higher than the maximum number of characters in your FIELD1 field. This will fill the rest of space (up to 25 characters) on the left of the field with period's, it should be adjusted to fill the rest of your textbox.

Hope this helps.

Jarret