Value processor

The value processor is a tool for simple data manipulation and formatting operations that are run client-side.

Common use cases include:

• Toggling boolean values

• Incrementing integers such as a counter in a loop

• Shifting dates to find the beginning of the month or year for a date

• Formatting dates and numbers based on the end-user's locale settings

• Adding or removing references in a multi-reference property

• Format a Rich Text property to Plain Text or Markdown

Usage

You can open the value processor from two places:

• From the three-dots menu after setting a value for a property.

• In the data binding dialog.

Once the value processor has been applied to a value, an icon will be shown next to the value. You can click this icon to open the value processor and view the operations in place.

Operations

The operations that are available depend on the data type of the value. Operations can be chained, for example to first add a value and then to format it. The operations are evaluated in the same order they are added.

Boolean

• Invert Boolean to toggle a boolean value.

Example

Say you have a detailed view of an Employee. The view is usually read only but the employee can click a button to make it editable. You keep track of which state the view has by using a boolean property in App Variables, called Employee edit enabled.

Then you can create an action for the edit button with an Update Object action node for App Variables. For the Employee edit enabled property, select the existing Employee edit enabled value, and use the value processor to add an invert boolean operation. Note: inverting a boolean variable that has no value or is Null will return True

Datetime

Detailed information about these operations is available under Date and time.

• Add a fixed number of datetime units to the value.

• Subtract a fixed number of datetime units from the value.

• Start of to shift the value to the start of a datetime unit.

• End of to shift the value to the end of a datetime unit.

• Format the value in a pre-defined or custom format.

Example

In an app, you often need to consider data in a given period relative to today's date. Say you want to view Assignments that started within the last 3 months or that are starting in the next 3 months.

You can add two Datetime properties to App Variables, Three months ago and Three months ahead. Set both variables to the built-in value Date Today.

For Three months ago use the value processor to subtract 3 months and shift to the start of the day, while for Three months ahead use add three months and shift to the end of the day. Now you can use these two variables to filter the data source holding the Assignments.

Float and Integer

• Add a fixed or data-bound number to the value.

• Subtract a fixed or data-bound number from the value.

• Format the integer or float as a string. You can e.g. specify the number of decimal places, hide the thousand-separator, or format the number as currency or percentage.

A general warning when using Value Processor to format a number or datetime to "built-in" types. E.g. formatting a datetime to Short date or a number to Currency (NOK): The output of these default may change over time, as they are controlled by third-parties or browsers. E.g. when Appfarm Create upgraded the server-side node.js library from version 18 to 20, the output for the built-in value processorCurrency (NOK) changed from "kr 20" to "20 kr". Do not build business logic that is hardcoded to these outputs (e.g. do not extract the "20" from the above string by using substring(3,5))

Multi-reference property

• Add references to an existing list of references

• Remove reference from an existing list of references

Example

Please see the value processor example in the Update Object article.

Rich Text property

• Format a Rich Text property to Plain Text or Markdown

Example

Please see the Rich Text section in the Text component article.