Placeholder filters (a way of changing field content before display) would be valuable to us. Filters could be concatenated so that several “effects” could be applied to text or numbers.
This could replace functionality currently only possible by creating a Formula column then using it to duplicate another column with some changes purely for DocuGen’s benefit. Anyone who has had to do this would appreciate these presentational matters being handled once in the template.
Example, using our Batch No. column. Currently the placeholder looks like this:
<<column_firstrow:Batch No.>>
: when you don’t want numbers shown with thousands separators, they could be treated as text by casting them like this:
<<column_firstrow:Batch No.|to_string>>
If you wanted to show a number to two decimal places you could do this:
<<column_firstrow:Price|decimals(2)>>
for example. They could also be chained together, for example:
<<column_firstrow:Batch No.|to_string|capitalize>>
Dates show in MySQL (Japanese) order, like this: 2023-06-08. You could offer formatting something like this:
<<column_firstrow:Batch No.|format("D/m/y")>>
This feature would support future expansion (other functions that could be performed on raw field data). It might be a way of exposing some of the datatype casting and string manipulation features of whatever language DocuGen is written in. I’m sure we would adapt to whatever conventions (Javascript, Python, etc.)