Numeric & Text Functions in Knack

Questions about your Knack app? Let's Chat. https://www.knackbuilders.com​. Knack has special functions used with either numeric equations or text formulas that do some pretty clever things. Extract just the city from an address field, generate a random number, find out the day of the week from a date field ... those sorts of things. Check it out, they are pretty simple to use.

Numeric Equation Functions: https://learn.knack.com/article/0xstljj9ta-numeric-equation-functions

Text Formula Functions: https://learn.knack.com/article/z2uiemxq8t-text-formula-functions

Get a free Knack trial account here: https://www.knack.com/r/you-tube

You can check out my Knack database services here: Knack!

Full Transcript

at knack

builders uh just gonna be a short video

but

uh today's topic is uh

using numeric and text functions

uh these are really cool i use them

regularly

and what they are

i'll show you this

i'll go through these in details but

they're special functions you can put in

either text equations or numeric

equations that do clever things

and they can be really helpful

so

i'll be right back and i'll take you

through how to use those thanks

[Music]

okay let's jump into this an american

text functions i did a couple videos one

on how to look at two dates

and extract how many work days they are

that uses one of these

and then i recently did one on how to

generate random numbers um

that's one of these two and

then i thought hey people should know

how to get these there's a whole bunch

of different ones that can be useful so

that's what this video is about i'll

leave these links or this link

in the uh

in the there's two links there's a knack

has a list of these different functions

one's for numerics

uh that's numbers equations

and the others for text formulas but

let's take a look at what they do um for

me the text formulas are a little more

interesting

uh but

this is the uh

numeric one

and they have all kinds of things in

here

cosine now if you're someone who needs

cosine last time i had to do sine or

cosine or things like that it was back

in a

you know college math class or something

and never ever needed it again but there

are people that use it and they have

some other these

now neck actually has

you know this in their fields you can do

things like min max average count

so that's a little redundant here but

they don't do medium you can probably i

don't think so but if they don't but

there's all kinds of different things

here's the random one sign

uh standard deviation these can all

be done here's that networking days

which counts working days but let's jump

over to the other one that i use more

often

are used to be used in text formulas

um

here's one

think of this as sort of extract

something from another field

uh i use this

not all that much but it's useful and

now i'm going to give you a use case

it extracts

to the left of some text field or to the

right of that text field a certain

amount of letters that you tell in this

case three

now here's a use case that i did we were

generating passwords for users creating

their accounts

and

we could just use something standard

like one two three four and then tell

them they can go in

and um

update the password after they log in

but we wanted to make a little more

professional and seem more secure so i

think i did something like extracted the

last three letters

of their last name

in the last three

numbers of their phone number now those

are two different fields but i got that

those uh that data and then i used

another text formula

to

uh combine those into one field and then

i forget how we did it with the password

we ran a task or a record rule or

something

that uh

set that value as the password so that

that was interesting

um

let me look at some other ones some of

these i don't use but

you turn something into all caps if that

was important

um let's keep going i don't know what

these rejects is

uh extracting date or address stuff

uh you can grab just the street from an

address

uh

you can grab just the city

you can grab this estate things like

that

that can be useful in a number of ways

same with names you can extract their

first name another use case too by the

way with this

uh

when you're when you're getting

to the left or to the right or something

you can i don't think mac in their name

thing says a standard thing where you

can just say hey give me the initials of

this person

so in this case you could do the first

letter of the first name

that'd be one field the first letter of

the last name be another

another field then you use a text field

to combine those two and then you would

have their initials

let's see what else we get

these get things are

are pretty cool

uh i think it's the date functions here

link

date functions you can get the

day of the week

or the month

from a date which can be useful too

um

in all kinds of ways but i'm not getting

the use cases in this case

i think what max says here

is it returns

like get day a week and will return

friday i don't think it does that what

it does is give you a number of the day

of the week

and and in this case the day of the week

starts on sunday

so if you get in one it's going to be a

sunday if you actually needed to have

fridays spelled out you'd probably have

to do a

do a multiple choice

or it could be a text but say a multiple

choice has the actual days of the week

monday tuesday wednesday whatever

then set a condition on that field that

says hey if this field that you just

made is number one set to sunday if it's

number two set to

monday that sort of thing uh there's

other things in here

as clever as you want you can get in

your uses of these

um now let me show you just briefly how

how would you use those

let's do this

let's do a text

text formula

it's just simple get right there get day

a week

and then you're gonna in the parentheses

put the date field that you want to get

it from the close the parenthesis and do

it that's the text field and that's just

pretty much the same thing for an

equation

let's just random right here

random is going to give you

um

that's the same thing you'll put random

in

you'll

here select

the number field that you or what you

want to get it from and then

or no here you'll put you're not drawing

off another field you're going to put

uh two numbers in there and the that's

what it'll generate one 100 will

generate a random number between those

so that's it folks uh

i hope this was just useful

appreciate it if you like this video you

know

do the click thing do the like thing

ring the bell

appreciate it take care