Moan: Why are the address & postcode fields memos?

[Eileen]

It would be so nice if they were strings.....
who in the world needs an address line or postcode > 255 bytes?

Since we are tied to Crystal Reports V8.5 (which HATES memo fields)... why must all these useful reporting fields in Actinic be of type 'memo'?

Fields where you might well want to store more than 255 bytes (ie the journal field) make sense to be memos.... but why oh why are the others that way?

Can we re-define them ourselves to be text fields?
Would Actinic freak out if we did?

[Jan]

Empty memo fields require less storage than empty text fields, that is why most text fields in Actinic are stored as memo's when they are small enough to be text.

When I need to use a memo field in a report I usually just define a query that selects left(255) of the field needed and use that query in the report rather than the actual field.

You could probably redefine the fields as text but it is not something that I would do - you never know what side effects could occur, now or in future versions of Actinic.

Regards,

[Eileen]

Hi Jan...
I didn't know that about the space used by empty fields!
Thanks for explaining.

I too have built queries to use the left x number of bytes from the memo fields.

Browsing the Crystal Reports forum, I see that the modern version of their product allows you to use memo fields in your formulas. It is very annoying when you cannot do in Cyrstal Reports what you can so easily do in an Access report or in VB.

cheers,