More Streamlined Form Letter Field Syntax
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Currently, the syntax for fields in form letters is somewhat inconsistent--some of it is very straightforward, whereas other parts are not.
Taking ClientRef as an example, the basic syntax is: {Matter.ClientRef}. This is fine--very intuitive.
If you want to add characters before or after the field value that only show up when there is data for that field, however, you have to specify each such character using +XXX, where XXX is the 3-digit ASCII code. Thus, if you want a form letter to say "Client Ref.: <Field Value>" but to completely omit this text if there is no client ref, the field changes to:
{+067+108+105+101+110+116+032+082+101+102+046+058Matter.ClientRef}
A person editing this form letter later will have no idea what the text is that these numbers represent. It makes it very difficult to revise form letters that have enhanced form fields like this. It also makes such form fields insanely long in some cases--the appended or prepended text codes will be be 4X as long as the actual text that they represent.
However, if you want to specify alternate text to display in place of the field if the field is empty/null, then the syntax is quite straightforward:
{!No Client Ref Specified!Matter.ClientRef}
You just enclose the alternate text in exclamation marks and put it immediately after the opening curly bracket. A person reviewing the field immediately knows what it will say if there is no data in the field.
I would like to suggest that AppColl update the syntax for form letter fields to also allow for text that is to be prepended and/or appended to a field value to be presented as either the +XXX format, as normal text, or as a mixture of the two. This seems like it would be relatively easy to implement, as you could have a routine that inspects the prepend/append clauses for non-+XXX values and then does a substitution to turn any such values into +XXX format for processing by AppColl's current algorithm.
