Using Placeholders
Many of the fields on the form require a combination of fixed text and variable text. The variable text represents the user’s name, or some similar identifying value. The placeholders are represented by <u> in the help on the screen, and in the examples. For example:
For user "fbloggs", if a Home Directory of "\\MyServer\MyShare\<u>" is specified as shown in the Help box, this will be expanded to \\MyServer\MyShare\fbloggs.
The following placeholders have been defined:
- <u> User Name
- <d> Display Name
- <a> Alias Name
- <f> First Name
- <l> Last Name
- <s> SMTP
For example to create a Display Name of last, first use the placeholder " <l>, <f>".
Extended placeholders allow you to specify any field that you wish, not merely the ones above.
By entering <#fieldname>, this will be replaced by the value of that field, i.e., <#first> will be replaced by the user’s first name.
This can be extended still further by extracting characters from the beginning (left), middle or end (right) of a field. For example, if the value in fieldname is: "abcdefg" then:
| Text | Meaning | Result |
| <#fieldname[right(2)]> | select the rightmost 2 chars | “fg” |
| <#fieldname[left(2)]> | select the leftmost 2 chars | “ab” |
| <#fieldname[mid(2,3)]> | select 3 characters from the middle, starting at character 2 | “bcd” |
More Examples
For example to extract the first initial from the first name use:
<#first[left(1)]>
To make a name from the last name, a comma, a space then the first initial you could use:
<l>, <#first[left(1)]>
If the text is "OFFNAME: NWiltshire" and you wish to extract "NWilts" in the field Office use:
<#office[mid(10,6)]>