text mode view help - can 2 conditions be applied for conditional formatting?

[SteveOw]

Hi Community -

Looking for a little help with Text Mode in a project View.

I’m trying to highlight a column for some tasks in a project. Think of this column as a “required field” that assignees need to know. action on the task. The highlight draws the project owner’s eyes to the field so they populate i.

When the project owner populates the required column I want the highlight to go back to default.

The first part is easy. Here’s the Text Mode column setting (converted to text mode from Standard Mode —> Advanced options)

English translation: color the Column “BAM Driver” yellow when the Column “Study Deliverable” is not empty for that task

displayname=

linkedname=direct

namekey=BAM Driver

querysort=DE:BAM Driver

styledef.case.0.comparison.icon=false

styledef.case.0.comparison.leftmethod=DE:Study Deliverable

styledef.case.0.comparison.lefttext=DE:Study Deliverable

styledef.case.0.comparison.operator=notblank

styledef.case.0.comparison.operatortype=string

styledef.case.0.comparison.righttext=

styledef.case.0.comparison.trueproperty.0.name=bgcolor

styledef.case.0.comparison.trueproperty.0.value=feecc8

styledef.case.0.comparison.truetext=

textmode=true

valuefield=BAM Driver

valueformat=customDataLabelsAsString

I’m struggling with removing the coloration when the project owner populates “BAM Driver”.  Any suggestions on how to put this condition into the Text Mode filter? Or maybe there are suggestions about other ways to do this?

-Steve

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @SteveOw,

It's possible to solve your requirement without going into textmode: the trick is to set up multiple Advanced Formatting rules in "top down" order. In your case, for example, you could:

• return to the visual (non-text) mode of the Advanced Settings
• edit your first rule to instead "not do anything" to the BAM Driver (unless you'd like to turn it green, to highlight that it's been provided) if the BAM Driver itself is NOT Blank
• add a second rule to "not do anything" to the BAM Driver (unless you'd like to turn it red, to highlight that it isn't expected to be provided) if the Study Deliverable IS Blank...noting that if the rules got this far, the BAM Driver IS Blank
• add a third rule to highlight the column "BAM Driver" in yellow if the Study Deliverable is NOT Blank (as you'd already figured out)...noting that if the rules got this far, the BAM Driver IS Blank and the Study Deliverable Is NOT Blank

It takes a little practice to learn how to arrange rules in this manner, but once you do, there's a lot you can do with them. Good luck!

Regards,

Doug

[SteveOw]

Hi Doug,

This was a great example. It clarified a LOT of my (mis)understanding of how a View's Advanced Options work: statements are executed in series, but do not overwrite each other.  And I've got this all working ~ thank you!

One wrinkle to add... I got this to work only when I explicitly defined the column rule to make the field WHITE when true. took me a minute to realize I needed to do this, just because I took the phrase "not do anything" literally and didn't specify a background color.

If you truly do "not do anything" when a condition is true, it can be overwritten by a later statement, I guess.

thanks again,

Steve

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

My pleasure Steve,

I’m glad you got it going, and thanks for explaining the Do Nothing caveat! I did not know that, but suppose it does make sense.

I typically go with meaningful colors (red, yellow green, etc.), which might be why I had never encountered it.: in fact,, I actually considered saying to choose white in my instructions, but remembered that looking strange when it overruled other “color the entire row” rules I had defined.

Accordingly, I amend my Do Nothing advice to Do Minimal: if I ever encounter the need (as you have), I plan to explicitly set the alignment to either left, center, or right (whichever is most appropriate for the datatype being presented), provided that doing at least one (hence Do Minimal) instruction is then indeed sufficient to halt further rules from taking effect (vs them being “additive”).

That was very interesting loophole: thanks for mentioning it!

Regards,

Doug