Problems with business rules "BT must not have leading or trailing whitespace"

[lesomue]

Hi,

we are currently using SDK 1.12 and have problems with the rules regarding the prohibition of leading and trailing whitespaes for text and identifier fields. Some of our customers use trailing whitespaces for formatting purposes and run into errors when using it.

We would kindly ask you to reconsider the use of the rules, especially as we cannot see the practical use of it.

Please let us know if this would be possible

Many thanks in advance!

[YvesJo]

Hi,
There is no formatting option in eforms.
It would be good if you could illustrate precisely the encountered issue so that this could be addressed properly.
KR

[lesomue]

We are aware that there is no formatting in eForms. Nevertheless, some contracting authoritys use consecutive whitespaces to clearly separate content from each other within their entered text.
Furthermore, we do not fully understand the purpose of those rules. Could you please explain?

[YvesJo]

When it comes to identifiers and reference to identifiers, inconsistent encoding with sporadic whitespaces leads to non matching items. When it comes to text and extra spaces, could you may be illustrate this with a precise example we could look into?
Thanks

[ferrakaop]

@lesomue please have a look a similar discussion at #1072 (comment)

Spaces are the start or end of a field used as an identifier can lead to poor data quality. We are interested any cases where these spaces would be valid. Note that we propose to allow extra spaces within the field, which would allow some cosmetic spacing if really needed - for example, are your users trying to put more than one indentifier into a field?

[lesomue]

Hi, thank you for your answer. If you remove the check for repeated whitespaces as stated in #1072, this would be fine for us.

[ferrakaop]

Thanks for your reply, we will make the change in SDK 1.14 so we only reject leading or trailing spaces but not extra spaces within the field.