I have a problem that maybe someone can offer their expertise toward solving for me.  I’m fairly new to Crystal Reports and need to print the name of two employees at the bottom of a survey form.  The reason for the breakdown is I don’t want to print the employees’ full name. Just the initials so they can be identified only by the staff and not the person receiving the survey form to complete. It's a privacy thing. Here is what I’ve done so far to reach a solution and the problem facing me. The two employee names ‘employee1’ and ‘employee2’ are each in a separate field as follows:

‘employee1’ (Last, First); ‘employee2’ (Last, First)

In formulas, I broke down the fields as follows to reach the result at the bottom of the page for employee1. 

DRV FNAME: stringvar firstname :=split({Forms_Standard_Drivers.DriverName},",")[2]

DRV LNAME:  stringvar lastname :=split({Forms_Standard_Drivers.DriverName},",")[1];

DRV_INIT:  LEFT ({@DRV LNAME}, 3)

DRVF_INIT: LEFT ({@DRV FNAME}, 2)

 Final fields at bottom of report for employee 1

     DRV_INIT     DRVF_INIT

I did the same thing for the second employee, ie:

ATT FNAME:  stringvar firstname :=split({Forms_Standard_Drivers.AttendantName},",")[2] (etc., etc.)

The solution worked fine until there was no name returned in one or the other fields.  This kicked out an array error and printing would not complete.

My question is this:  Can this formula be condensed into one instance and allow for the skipping over the field if it is blank and enter a 0 (zero), n/a or something to avoid the array error? Currently, each of the DRV.. and ATT.. formulas are individual ones.  I’m guessing there is a much more efficient way of achieving this objective and would really, really appreciate your expert guidance.  Thank you.

Edited by Jakecola - 05 May 2012 at 11:07am

Thank you very much. This may seem a really, really dumb question but will the suggested formula affect the database, it's tables or data, in any way? I'm unfamiliar with the command 'input variable' and it's use in the function. I am quite new to Crystal and just want to be safe rather than sorry. If I wasn't very clear before, all I am wanting to do is pull existing names from a record and place the names, in their abbreviated form, at a position on a survey form.   Again, thank you so much for helping me.

Edited by Jakecola - 07 May 2012 at 8:36am

Many thanks to you for your generous help and advice. Heck, if we lived close to each other, I'd offer to mow your yard or something. I plan to try the code, as written, later, and I'm excited to see the result; however, I am a newbie and I may have yet another ignorant question to ask. I'm not afraid to try different things to make something work so I will strive to not be more of a pest than I already have been. Your patience with me is most appreciative.

You're the best!

JC

ok, then it is off to debugging.  print the field, check if it has a comma