SmartIQ can parse formulas made up of functions to perform various dynamic formatting tasks or calculations.

Functions

Functions require a set of parameters to determine a result. These parameters may be literal values, references to other questions, or even other functions. Functions must include the function name followed by any parameters in brackets, or empty brackets if no parameters are required.

To perform more complex calculations, formulas may also incorporate various math, date and text functions. For example, the DateDiff() function can be used to calculate a person’s age based on their date of birth and today’s date.

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Best Practice

Parameters are separated by commas and for best practice spaces should be inserted after commas to avoid issues for users using international cultures.

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Best Practice

Formulas in Variable questions can reference other SmartIQ questions. Whenever possible, questions should only refer to other questions which come earlier in the form structure. References to later questions (often called a "forward reference") may work but can also behave unreliably; for this reason forward references are not recommended.

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Functions executed on datasource data will cause SmartIQ to attempt to load the entire datasource

This is not tractable for data sets larger than SmartIQ's data retrieval limitation, prefiltering of the datasource either from within or using filters on unmodified fields is advised.

Aggregate functions

Aggregate functions are a specific type of function, that requires multiple values for the computation to make sense, for example calculating an Average(). These functions require a reference to a multi-row Data Question, or a question in a Repeating Page or Section which may be of any question type. Aggregate functions examine all the values retrieved to determine a result, and can be identified in the functions lists as they ask for a question reference to a repeater or data-source.

Defaulting a Function output

Formulas can be used in any text box within question properties for dynamic calculation, however if the function/s used don't have a valid input the formula will display in the location where the output is meant to display. This issue can be solved by setting a defaults for the function inputs using Variable questions and Reference Tags.

Auto formats strings syntax

There are a number of strings of symbols or terms that can be used to automatically format text.

Named Numeric Formats

When specifying common formats for numbers there are several named terms can be used. For example 'currency' could be used rather than '$0.00'. The terms are useful for the format function or document format property.

Custom date/time format strings

This page is a summary of the information from the Custom date and time format strings from Microsoft.

For detailed information and examples on the use of these formats please see the Microsoft page.

Custom numeric format strings

You can create a custom numeric format string, which consists of one or more custom numeric specifiers, to define how to format numeric data. A custom numeric format string is any format string that is not a standard numeric format string.

The following table describes the custom numeric format specifiers and displays sample output produced by each format specifier.

Commas, decimal points, percent symbols and zeros are all specific format specifiers. Using these symbols in combination with the # digit placeholder to create format patterns may cause in unexpected results. If any of these symbols are used as character literals rather than format specifiers they must be escaped with the \ escape character. See below for more information.

This information is a summary of the Custom numeric format strings page from Microsoft and includes links to more information on each Format string from that page.

See the Notes section for additional information about using custom numeric format strings, and the Example section for a comprehensive illustration of their use.