Question

Pull first letter from last name

Quick Fields

Updated June 25, 2014

asked on April 29, 2014

We want to create documents from student records and place them in the correct alphabetic folder. Such as the Last Name is Smith, place the document in the S folder, when processing it in quick fields. Is there a way to concatenate the last name an pull the first character.

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Answer

APPROVED ANSWER

replied on April 29, 2014

You can add a Pattern Matching page processing activity. With this activity, you can specify your input (in this case, the last name) and then choose a regular expression to capture only the first letter of that name.

Your pattern depends on your input. I'll provide some examples of what pattern you can use based on your input:

Smith [OR] Smith, Tom -- (\w)

Tom Smith -- \w+\s(\w)\w+

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replied on April 29, 2014 • Show version history

We do this in Workflow using Pattern Matching and I believe you can do the same thing in QuickFields. See below for the example.

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replied on April 29, 2014

In QuickFields, add the last name token and then right click the token and open the token editor. In the token editor, apply the (\S) regular expression to only return the first character.

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replied on June 25, 2014

Another thought for this is to take the document and place it in an incoming folder, then trigger a workflow or let a rule trigger it to file it away that does the same procedure (use the metadata trimmed by using \S).

Then you can setup a starting rule that files things away that are placed in that incoming folder as well. For example, someone uses snapshot to print to that incoming folder and it then files it away properly for them.

If somewhere down the road you need to change the filing structure (maybe you change it to year/a/Adams, John) you don't need to change the QF session, just the workflow.

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Pull first letter from last name

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