padleft(X;Y)

Example

In the example for padright(X;Y), we used the "Product Master" table (pub.demo.retail.prod) to demonstrate how we could add padding to the department descriptions to help align the division descriptions in a computed column we created. We used Macro Language similar to the following.

<base table="pub.demo.retail.prod"/>
<willbe name="padright_dept" value="padright(deptdesc;20)"/>
<willbe name="padright_result" label="Department / Division" 
 value="splice(padright_dept divdesc;'/')" format="width:40"/>

which resulted in a column that looked like:

But what if we wanted to add space before the division descriptions so that they appeared right-justified after the slashes ("/"), resulting in a column that looked something like:

FOOTWEAR            /        APPAREL             
SNACKS              /        GROCERY
SNACKS              /        GROCERY
TOOLS/AUTO          /      DRY GOODS
TOOLS/AUTO          /      DRY GOODS

We could use padleft(X;Y) to add padding to the beginning of the division descriptions so that they are all the same length.

For our example, let's make all the division descriptions 15 characters in length. To do this, create a computed column and apply padleft(X;Y) to the divdesc column and specify 15 for the Y parameter:

<willbe name="padleft_divdesc" value="padleft(divdesc;15)"/>

This creates a new column whose division description values are all 15 characters in length, with extra blank spaces added to the beginning of those values that are less than 15 characters:

Note: Though the blank spaces do not appear in the new created column, they are part of the values in that column, which you will see in the following step.

Now, we can create a new computed column using the splice(X;Y) function again, but this time we will specify the new padleft_divdesc column instead of the divdesc column in the list for the X parameter so that we get the padded strings:

<willbe name="padleft_result" label="Department / Division" 
 value="splice(padright_dept padleft_divdesc;'/')" format="width:40"/>

This results in a column that looks like:

Now, each division description is 15 characters in length, following the slash, and is padded on the left with blanks.