If you define a field as "datetime" then you'll get the standard ELOG input field for datetime. It will be stored as seconds of the epoch (seconds since 1.1.1970).

You can define a field as a default string input, then it is stored as a string. But you can convert that string by a shell scripts into seconds of the epoch. See "subst" command in the documentation of the elog syntax:

Subst Author = $author from $remote_host

  Subst Info = $shell(cat /tmp/filename)              (Unix)
  Subst Info = $shell(type c:\tmp\filename)           (Windows)

Subst Number = XYZ-#####

XYZ-00001
XYZ-00002
XYZ-00003

Subst Number = XYZ-%Y-%b-###

XYZ-2005-Oct-001
XYZ-2005-Oct-002
XYZ-2005-Oct-003

XYZ-2005-Nov-001
XYZ-2005-Nov-002

Hi Stefan,

I've just tried to read the $text with subst into another field and failed.
It looks like $text is only available for the execution of shell scripts in the "execute new|edit|delete = <script>" command.

Could that be added? I can think of a multitude of applications:

• In my case I want to fill an attribute X either with free text or generated from other fields. The list view will show just X and not how it was generated.
• I could fill an attribute automatically with the character length of the text.
• I could parse the text in a shell script and set other attributes according to the content.

Thank you for considering it.

Cheers, Andreas

While the input widget of text attributes is a single line, they can easily be multi-line in the display - when you use HTML at least.
And of course the user can parse the text field and generate a single line, if he wants to.
If you leave it to me, I'll create wonderful applications to that feature :-)

Please? ;-)

Hi Stefan,
no problem: if I just strip all newlines from the $text field (in HTML you use <br> anyway, the newline has no function apart from whitespace), and my multiline attribute is fine to go.
I do not intend to make the attribute editable: it is just used for display. Because that allows me to create the attribute either from free text or from combining other fields - depending on conditional attributes.

As a special feature you could strip all newlines beforehand, when providing the $text for subst statements.

Cheers, Andreas

If you would post a minimal config file where the problem occurs, then we could look what the problem is.

Would it be possible to create a new command "List format <attribute> = <css_class_name>,<css_class_value>,<width>,<size>", or is there another way to achieve this?

Okay, found some solution for my problem:

And file themes/default/pikett.css contains:

That works like a charm - until I log in to the logbook. Then the include of the CSS in the header is garbled with some "prefix" of random chars:

And a quick check in the source code shows some bad code:

L7615: function "show_html_header"

Here css_base is a not initialized local variable of the function. In fact the above line is the only reference of that variable char css_base[1000].

The bug is still present in elog-3.1.4-611489b

I should tell that I found a simpler way to achieve the same:
I suppress the "text" field and use a single line text input field instead.
The single line input in "free text" modes just contains "<br>" : I would have had to use those in the text field anyway.