cut out the name of a document

Question

Hey all. 
 I have a validation in which the name of the uploaded attachment can't have more than 100 characters. I need that Appian automatically cut the name to maximum 100 characters. 
 I was trying to make an expression rule; I made an index to find the character number 101, I wanted to insert a "," to split the text and then remove it... but I can't because the insert function doesn't accept text for the index parameter. 
 Ideas? 
 Example value: nombredocumentosnombredocumentosnombredocumentosnombredocumentosnombredocumentosnombredocumentosnombredocumentos

Mike Schmitt · Answer

I think you need to understand what index() does -- when you give it a number as the second parameter, it attempts to return a corresponding array position from the source data. Since a text string is really just an array of characters , it will return you the letter at that position of the string. Note this isn't really a conventional use of index() (and not every function will treat a string as an array of characters), but that's what it's doing here, and from what I can tell it's totally unrelated to what you're really after. 
 I believe you might have some success using the "fileNames" parameter of FileUploadField and your expression rule. Personally, I'd opt instead to just use a user-facing validation similar to the following: a!localVariables(
 local!file: null(),

 a!fileUploadField(
 saveInto: local!file,
 value: local!file,
 maxSelections: 1,
 validations: {
 if(
 len(fv!files.name) > 5,
 "filename too long (5 characters for this example)",
 null()
 )
 }
 )
) ...which will simply provide some feedback like this: 
 However I assume (but haven't tried per se) that you could instead use the "fileNames" parameter as I mentioned to auto-truncate the filename - note that, as far as I can tell, the change doesn't happen until Form Submission time, so you'll need to experiment with it some. a!localVariables(
 local!file: null(),

 a!fileUploadField(
 saveInto: local!file,
 value: local!file,
 maxSelections: 1,
 
 fileNames: left(fv!file.name, 5) /* insert your own length here */
 
 /*validations: {
 if(
 len(fv!files.name) > 5,
 "filename too long (5 characters for this example)",
 null()
 )
 }*/
 )
)

cut out the name of a document

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