Formatting a field as a phone number

AppGini supports automatic formatting of data by using the Data Format tab. Select any field in AppGini, and go to that tab. You can then select a data format from the list, as shown in this screen shot below.

We can add more formats to this list easily. For example, we can add phone number formatting like the above question. To do so, we should edit the dataFormats.cfg file using a text editor. You can find this file in the add-ons folder inside the folder where AppGini is installed (usually C:\Program Files\AppGini). The line that we need to add for formatting phone numbers is:

Phone number (example: 123-45-6789); CONCAT_WS(‘-‘, LEFT(%%FIELD%%,3), MID(%%FIELD%%,4,2), RIGHT(%%FIELD%%,4))

The syntax of this line is easy: A human-readable description of the format, followed by a semi-colon, followed by the MySQL syntax to be used in formatting the field. The %%FIELD%% placeholder in this syntax tells AppGini where to put the field name in the generated code. After adding the above line to the dataFormats.cfg file, we can see the new format in the data formats list in AppGini, as shown in the screen shot below.