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!
