When editing history, activity, and notes records, Act! allows rich formatting of the text in the details and note fields. In Act! v21 and earlier, this formatting is stored using rich text formatting codes. Starting in v22, the formatting is stored using HTML formatting instead. Reporting4Act! provides methods for handling these formatting codes.

In the history and activity tables, Reporting4Act! has Details (Text Only) and Details (With Formatting) fields available for reports. The notes tables have similar Note (Text Only) and Note (With Formatting) fields. The behavior and uses for these different fields are explained below.

The Text Only fields retrieve only the plain text of the field values, with all the formatting information stripped out. This allows the unformatted text to be output in reports, and the report's own font settings can be used to apply formatting to the values. Since this requires processing each value to remove the formatting codes, filtering using these values isn't supported, as the performance would be very slow. Even when using these fields on reports, use the corresponding With Formatting field in any filter conditions. The main uses for these fields are:

• Displaying Unformatted Text: These fields display their contents in plain text, matching the rest of the report formatting.
• Applying Alternate Formatting: These fields can have their formatting set through the standard report field formatting controls.
• Exporting Data: If a report is intended to generate exported data that will be used elsewhere, then these fields should be used if this data should be output in plain text, and not include the formatting codes.

Starting in v22, Act! uses HTML rather than RTF to store the text formatting information for details and notes. Reporting4Act!'s Formatted HTML doesn't currently support the HTML generated in Act!, so the Text Only fields should be used for displaying these values in reports.

The With Formatting fields retrieve the field text as-is from the database, including all formatting codes. Since the formatting codes are not intended to be displayed as plain text, these fields are usually not output in plain text on reports. Instead, if the field is to be displayed in the report output, normally the Formatted RTF option is used.

The main uses for these fields are:

• Filtering: Since no extra processing is required to generate the values for these fields, filter conditions using them can be evaluated quickly.
• Displaying Formatted Text: With the Formatted RTF option in a report field's properties, it's possible to output these fields including their text formatting in report output.
• Exporting Data: If a report is intended to generate exported data that will be used elsewhere, then these fields should be used if this data should include the formatting codes.