String formatting function

Question

I need help to write a method which will do some kind of string formatting. I have list of ids of an object. It may be any object.Like this:

List<Id> listContactIds = [select id from contact limit 5];

And I have a certain string format like this:

String format = "{name} belongs to {Account.Name}";

I need to call a method. Suppose the method name is formatString.

formatString(listContacts, format);

The method should be able to return list of formatted strings. We can take the exact field names enclosed in {} from the format string.

How to acheive this?

Answer 1

You could use the string format(String stringToFormat, List formattingArguments) method.

Example:

String formatted = string.format('{0} belongs to {1}', new string[]{variable1, variable2});

Answer 2

This is the working code which will handle relationship fields also:

//By Using sObject List you can store records of any object
List<sObject> acc = [Select name,Account.Name,Account.Id from Contact limit 10];

//Insted of using a single string as format, I've used a list of sting where the first and last value is
// field names and the middle one is the text you want to use in formatting.
String[] fieldformat = new String[]{'Name', 'belongs to', 'Account.Name'};


//This is a method that does the formatting for you and returns you a list of formatted strings
List<String> formatString (List<sObject> objects,  List<String> format)
{
    List<String> formattedStrings = new List<String>();
    for(sObject obj : objects)
    {
        String Str = ((format[0].contains('.')) ? getString(obj,format[0]) : String.valueOf(obj.get(format[0]))) + ' ' + format[1] + ' ' + ((format[2].contains('.')) ? getString(obj,format[2]): String.valueOf(obj.get(format[2])));
        formattedStrings.add(Str);
    }
     return formattedStrings;
}
List<String> outPut = formatString(acc, fieldformat);

String getString(Sobject obj, String str){
    String objName = str.substring(0,str.indexOf('.'));
    String fieldName = str.substring(str.indexOf('.')+1,str.length());
    return String.valueOf(obj.getSObject(objName).get(fieldName));
}
System.debug(outPut);

Answer 3

It could be something like this:

List<Contact> listContacts = [select name,Account.Name from Contact limit 5];
list<String> formattedstrings = new list<string>();
for (Contact cont:listContacts) {
    formattedstrings.add(cont.name+' belongs to '+cont.Account.name);
}