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FormAPI with a replicant

Anip

I'm hoping someone out there can help me with some code. I've seen a number of posts on similar issues with replicants and FormAPI but haven't found the answer.

I have a replicant (if it's still called that now I'm not using the replicant element and just defining min/max attribute values for a container) with 5 items in it - contentType, subheading, paragraph, image, imageCaption. The value of the top item "contentType" will be either "text" or "image" and the user's selection of this determines which of the other items to show in the container (i.e. if it's "text" show "subheading" and "paragraph" but hide the image related fields and vice versa).

I've managed to code the onChange event so that each replicant happily shows you different items depending on your choice of "text" or "image" but I'm having trouble initialising it for both new and existing DCRs.

My DCT conforms to datacapture6.0.dtd and the relevant bit is as follows:


<container name="content" min="1" max="20" location="content" combination="and">
 <label>Content Blocks</label>
 <item name="contentType" pathid="contentType" default="text">
  <label/>
  <radio required="f">
   <option selected="t" value="text" label="Text"/>
   <option value="image" label="Image"/>
  </radio>
 </item>
 <item name="subheading" pathid="subheading">
  <label>Section Heading</label>
  <text required="f" maxlength="255"/>
 </item>
 <item name="paragraph" pathid="paragraph">
  <label>Paragraph</label>
  <textarea cols="50" external-editor="visualformat" external-editor-inline="t" required="f" rows="10" wrap="off"/>
 </item>
 <item name="imageCaption" pathid="imageCaption">
  <label>Image Caption</label>
  <description>A caption for use in the alt title of the displayed image.</description>
  <text required="f" maxlength="255"/>
 </item>
 <item name="image" pathid="image">
  <label>Full Image</label>
  <browser extns=".gif,.jpg" initial-dir="/images/fullsize"/>
 </item>
</container>

I've attached my javascript - including all rambling and commented debug code. You can see where the onChange is working and where I'm trying to work out how to initialise the state of the replicant items in the init() function. I thought I'd be able to use getChildren() but have had little success. I thought getChildren would return an array of all the replicant instances. But I've discovered through trial and error that I can't do a getChildren for the replicant array as a whole but if I do getChildren on a single instance of the replication item will give me all the item names *within* that single replicant rather than giving me the number of replications. Which isn't what i want at all!!

Basically what I want to do is write a loop passing


for(x=1;x<___THIS_IS_THE_VALUE_I_CAN'T_GET___;x++){
      typeHandler(IWDatacapture.getItem("/standard/content["+x+"]/contentType"));
}

I just don't know how to get the value for the number of instances of my replicant to enable me to loop through.

If you got this far and still understand what I'm on about - well done - and thanks for taking the time to look through this.

cheers
Ani

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Comments

Dwayne

I haven't sat down and analyzed your code, but ...

There may be another way to go about this. Rather than having one container with 5 elements, you could go with nested containers, and have the outer container use combination="or"> instead of combination="and". That way, users get to choose, when they add an element, if it should be an image container or a text container. Something like this:

<container name="content" min="1" max="20" location="content" combination="

Of course, your presentation template would have to change, and become more complex to deal with the "or" replicant.

--

Current project: TS 5.5.2/6.1 W2K

datahide.rptdesign

Anip

Hi Dwayne,

Thanks for getting back to me and you're very right to suggest that. I probably should have explained my reason for this design with my post. I started off with containers and it resulted in a bit of a usability mess which is why I changed to using FormAPI. If there were any other way to determine how "or" combination containers are displayed to the end-user in the UI that might also solve my problem?

You see, initially the template design was more complicated in strict accordance with the requirements. Logically there was a contentBlock container with an "or" combination of either a "textBlock" or an "imageBlock". TextBlock itself was also a container with an "or" combination as it contained either subheading or paragraph and "image" was an "and" container to hold all information about the image. I put that together and built the presentation template for it but when I tried to create content via the form it was too cumbersome.

From a user's perspective there were too many hidden aspects and too many "+" button's to click for different and confusing purposes i.e. one "+" for adding a new contentBlock then another of the same "+" buttons for changing between "textBlock" and "image", they were on top of each other and made no sense to the end-user as to which was which and what the difference was - and this was even after I removed the extra confusion of the surplus 3rd level textBlock container.

This is just one aspect of a bigger form that we're trying to make as simple as possible for the end-user hence I turned to to FormAPI to have the radio buttons provide the "text" / "image" option in order to make the form's construct a little more transparent. I'm very happy with usability of the form like this but if I can't find a FormAPI solution then I will most likely go back to containers as you suggest.

cheers
Ani

Adam Stoller

Keep in mind that if you change the structure of your DCT with respect to adding or removing containers - that older DCRs will not correctly line-up their data, and you will need to phsyically re-structure all such older DCRs to conform to the new structure of the DCT (not a fun task as I understand it - I've come close to doing this but haven't actually had to do it yet).

So - when you're testing your design ideas - make sure you're testing only against DCRs of the proper DCT-type-version.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Anip

Again, I probably should have explained. This is the early stages of a brand new Teamsite 6 install, so there are no old or existing DCRs to cope with and any content that's there is only my test stuff while I'm building it.

(At the risk of confusing matters, I might add that we do have an old Teamsite 5.01 but we're not actually 'upgrading' and so are essentially starting again from scratch.)

So then - any one out there know how to count the number of replicants in use??

Ani

Adam Stoller

I think it's something like this:var contentrepl = IWDatacapture.getItem("/standard/content").getChildren();
for(x = 1; x < contentrepl.length; x++){
...
} (I can't remember off-hand if it's 'length' or 'length()', nor whether it would be "/standard/content" or "/standard/content/*" - so use a grain of salt with the above code).

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com