Yes, its been a while, Im sorry, mumble, mumble ... no excuses. Well other than its been, as my son would say 'hecka busy.' On a brighter note I see Kan has been posting some cool stuff in my absence, long may he continue!
I received a question today asking about using a wildcard in a template, something like:
<?if:INVOICE = 'MLP*'?> where * is
the wildcard
Well that particular try does not work but you can do it without building your own wildcard function. XSL,
the underpinning language of
the RTF templates, has some useful string functions - you can find them listed here. I used
the starts-with function to achieve a simple wildcard scenario but
the contains can be used in conjunction with some of
the others to build something more sophisticated.
Assume I have a a list of friends
and the amounts of money they owe me ... Im very generous
and my interest rates a pretty competitive :0)
<ROWSET>
<ROW>
<NAME>Andy</NAME>
<AMT>100</AMT>
</ROW>
<ROW>
<NAME>Andrew</NAME>
<AMT>60</AMT>
</ROW>
<ROW>
<NAME>Aaron</NAME>
<AMT>50</AMT>
</ROW>
<ROW>
<NAME>Alice</NAME>
<AMT>40</AMT>
</ROW>
<ROW>
<NAME>Bob</NAME>
<AMT>10</AMT>
</ROW>
<ROW>
<NAME>Bill</NAME>
<AMT>100</AMT>
</ROW>
Now, listing my friends is easy enough
<for-each:ROW> <NAME> <AMT> <end for-each>
but lets say I just want to see all my friends beginning with 'A'. To do that I can use an XPATH expression to filter
the data
and tack it on to
the for-each expression. This is more efficient that using an 'if' statement just inside
the for-each.
<?for-each:ROW[starts-with(NAME,'A')]?>
will find me all
the A's.
The square braces denote
the start of
the XPATH expression. starts-with is
the function Im calling
and Im passing
the value I want to check i.e. NAME
and the string Im looking for. Just substitute in
the characters you are looking for.
You can of course use
the function in a if statement too.
<?if:starts-with(NAME,'A')?><?attribute@incontext:color;'
red'?><?end if?>
Notice I removed
the square braces, this will highlight text
red if
the name begins with an 'A'
You can even use
the function to do conditional calculations:
<?sum (AMT[starts-with(../NAME,'A')])?>
Sum only
the amounts where
the name begins with an 'A' Notice
the square braces are back, its a function we want to apply to
the AMT field. Also notice that we need to use ../NAME.
The AMT
and NAME elements are at
the same level in
the tree, so when we are at
the AMT level we need
the ../ to go up a level to then come back down to test
the NAME value.
I have built out
the above functions in a sample template here.
Huge prizes for
the first person to come up with a 'true' wildcard solution i.e. if NAME like '*im*exter* demand cash now!
