InfoPath Dev

Hi, How do I go about changing the first letter of a word to be capatalized and the rest of the word lowercase?

 For example: changing "JOHN SMITH" or "john smith" to "John Smith" in a text box.

Please help!

That will be tricky using simply xpath expressions.  Here is what I came up with that will take you half the way there:

concat(translate(substring(field1, 1, 1), "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz", "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"), translate(substring(field1, 2, string-length(field1)), "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ", "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"))

Let me explain the concepts in the this expression:

• translate(string, find, replace) - there is no convert text to upper or lowercase function.  This is the workaround.  To uppercase a word, I'm basically looking or all the lowercase letters and replacing them with the corresponding uppercase letter.
• substring(string, start, length) - I'm getting the first character and make it uppercase, then I'm taking the rest of the string and making it lowercase.
• concat(string, string) - and finally I'm putting the two strings together

This solution will only work for the single word case, but hopefully can get you started in building the right expression for your solution.

I've never tried this before, and it did seem to take a mess of rules. There might be a better way :-) But attached is an example of field that has this behaviour.

It uses SPACE as the word separator and it will fail with an error if there's more than 4-5 spaces in the field. Hopefully this will be enough for most situations.

It works! Thank you both for your help!

Hi Skarn,

 What if some of my text boxes will only be filled in by one word and there won't be a SPACE in the text boxes?

Added another rule at the very beginning to cater for this.

There is a key method I've used to accomplish this. It resolved a problem you can get if you try to set a fields value using a rule on the field itself.

Infopath checks and runs the rules on a field immediately after it gets changed, so it can get stuck in an infinite loop (which it breaks by giving the user an error).

The new rule I've added at the beginning is the simplest example of the method to work around the infinite loops issue so that the rule only runs once after the initial field change.

'flag field' = 'resting state value' as default
Change Field -> Run rule if 'flag field' is 'resting state value' -> Rule changes 'flag field' to 'processing state value' -> Rule changes field value -> (A) Infopath runs rules from beginning (as field just changed again) -> Rule does not run this time as 'flag field' is currently = 'processing state value' -> Infopath returns to (A) and runs next action in rule -> Rule changes 'flag field' back to 'resting state value' -> Rules finish.

'flag field' = 'resting state value' again ready for next field change.

Might be a bit hard to get your head around but in an extreme usage allowed me to create the mess of rules with produced the desired outcome you asked for ;-)