FreeB Formats New Lines and Padding

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[edit] Padding

Generally all of the white space in a FreeB format is not predicatable. So if you have the data

$my_first_tag = "some data";
$my_second_tag = "more data";

and the template...

{$my_first_tag}      {$my_second_tag}

The results would be

some data     more data

But if you change the value of the tags...

$my_first_tag = "lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of text";
$my_second_tag = "more data";

the results would be

lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of text     more data

Which is ok if that is what you intend, but on a paper form the first tag will probably have overun its space on the page, and the second tag might be pushed off the page entirely. Often you need to place data predictably on a page... for instance on the HCFA(CMS) 1500, on the top of the page the payer and payer address need to be listed about 45 spaces to the right. To do things like this you will use a special FreeB modifier called "pad". You should generally be familiar with how Smarty Modifiers work. The FreeB pad modifier allows you to predictably fill space on a page. If the data is to long it gets trucated if it is too short spaces are added to make up the difference. The general format is...

{$some_variable_name|pad:10}

where the number after the ":" after the word pad (here 10) is the number of spaces that will be used... Referring to the top of the HCFA(CMS) 1500 format...

{""|pad:45}{$payer->get("name")|pad:30}

The first tag fills up 45 spaces, but the left side is empty so nothing is placed there. That is how you define a specific sized blank space in a FreeB format. The second tag will be replaced with 30 characters of the name of the payer. So you know that no characters will ever be printed past 75 characters (45 of blank space + 30 characters of payer name) by that line.

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[edit] New Lines

Generally FreeB formats will continue to print everything on the same line until you tell it otherwise. This is very usefull for electronic claims, because they should generally be on a single line, but on paper formats you need to tell FreeB to make a new line. There is a special tag for this...

{newline lines="1"}

As you might expect, the argument (lines) is the number of lines to skip. So the above tag will skip to the next line, but the following tag will skip ten lines..

{newline lines="10"}

Now you should be able to understand the first lines of a HCFA(CMS) 1500 format. Anything in a tag starting and ending with * is a comment, so the first line below is a comment.

{* *** Line 0 Top right address of payer *** *}
{""|pad:45}{$payer->get("name")|pad:30}
{newline lines="1"}
{""|pad:45}{$payer->get("line1")|pad:30}
{newline lines="1"}
{""|pad:45}{$payer->get("line2")|pad:30}
{newline lines="1"}
{""|pad:45}{$payer->get("city")|pad:15},{$payer->get("state")|pad:2}{""|pad:1}{$payer->get("zip")|pad:9}
{newline lines="1"}