I am using a Dialogue List in a SINGLE value field. One of the values in the Dialogue List has commas in it (this is NOT an uncommon problem, just ask the phone company which lists everyone as <lastname, firstname>).
The dialogue list is correct the first time I use it – commas are ignored as they should be. The next time I go in to use the list the original list is there and the value I selected earlier is added at the bottom as several separate values because of the included commas. This is USER data and I have no control over it. The Dialogue List is clearly using the commas as separators BUT shouldn’t be, because it’s a SINGLE value field.
I complained about this 6 years ago and it’s still broken - back then I got a response that read something like “that’s the way it works” — my answer to that is MicroSoft wouldn’t have done this (actually that’s where the values came from).
It goes something like this
Original Dialogue List:
a quick brown fox
red buttons
orange, red, and grey foxes
fred murtz
I select: orange, red, and grey foxes
Next time the Dialogue List is (nothing selected because nothing matches): Note the entire list is correct and then the selection is parsed as a multivalued selection.
a quick brown fox
red buttons
orange, red, and grey foxes
fred murtz
orange
red
and grey foxes
This is a bug – it’s an old bug – it should be fixed - it’s not a minor problem – if you’re going to have single and multi-valued fields they
should be treated as single valued when they are single valued. There is no way on a single valued field to turn off the comma seperators – I have NO place in ANY of my databases where I honor comma seperators – they’re not useful and often times become a problem so I turn them off in EVERY multivalued field.
When I originally reported this I was working on databases that were lastname driven (lots of lastname, firstname selections) – my clients didn’t at all like the inability to put a comma in – I was able to leave out the comma back then – in this case, I cannot!