Shorten a SQL VarChar result.

[Kenneth Keeley]

Hi,
I am creating a news and events page for my web site and I have a data
grid for the summary of news items that is using a TemplateColumn I can
layout the data in the format I wish. My only problem is that one of the
fields returned by the database is a very long VarChar, It is the story
field and thus can be hunderds of characters long. I wish to cut this back
to about 100 characters and then provide a link to a page that displays the
full story. My question is how do I dsiplay only the first 100 characters of
the story.

Thanks
Kenneth

 

[Scott Mitchell [MVP]]

I am creating a news and events page for my web site and I have a data
grid for the summary of news items that is using a TemplateColumn I can
layout the data in the format I wish. My only problem is that one of the
fields returned by the database is a very long VarChar, It is the story
field and thus can be hunderds of characters long. I wish to cut this back
to about 100 characters and then provide a link to a page that displays the
full story. My question is how do I dsiplay only the first 100 characters of
the story.

Kenneth, there are a couple of ways:

(1) Truncate the length on the SQL side. That is, use something like
the SUBSTRING SQL Server function (see http://tinyurl.com/579g5) to
truncate the varchar field.

(2) Bring back the entire SQL string, and then truncate it in your
ASP.NET page. If you are using a DataGrid you can use this free, custom
DataGrid column, LimitColumn -
http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/100202-1.aspx. Or you could
use a TemplateColumn along with a "helper function" that would receive
the long field as input and use the .Substring() method to return a
shortened version of the string.

hth

--

Scott Mitchell
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.4GuysFromRolla.com

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