While tweaking a Bionic Rules that powers our NameDrop config, I ran into a need to merge datasets based on the first 15 characters of a field value.



A lot of our Telecom companies have Account::Industry values that different suffixes.... for example:



Telecommunications - IT Services

Telecommunications - IT

Telecommunications

Telecommunications - Corporate



I wanted to do a merge on companies where the industry field simply starts with "Telecommunications", regardless of what the suffix was. 



I did this by creating a formula field on Customer Info that was "Left(Account::Industry,15)" which just grabs the first 15 characters of the field value. I was then able to do my desired merge on this formula field and achieve my desired result.



Is there a way I can do this in bionic rules or MDA without making a Salesforce formula field? I anticipate this will be a common scenario in customers that adopt the NameDrop concept.