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!
