Tom,

I'd go with an xslt extension and write a static method which does what it needs to do, limiting text to 200 chars... Anyway, need to be aware that you'll have to parse the text as well, as it may contain links and html tags (if that's the case for you...).

Here's some code that may get you started (it's code taken from xslt search, so credits go to @drobar):

public string StripTagsRegex(string source) { 
  return Regex.Replace(source, "<.*?>", string.Empty); 
}

Method will strip any html tags. And after that, make sure check for incomplete words (after limiting to 200 chars). Can use following code snippet for that:

public string StripUntilSpace(string source) {
  string copyOfSource = source;
  try {
    while (copyOfSource.Substring(copyOfSource.Length - 1, 1) != " ") {
      copyOfSource = copyOfSource.Substring(0, copyOfSource.Length - 1);
    }
    return copyOfSource;
  } catch { return source; }
  return source;
}

You can also use these functions inline in your xslt code, but there could be some performance issues when doing do.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

/Dirk