OR-Container - choice with FormAPI

Wiesel

Hi!

At first I want to excuse my bad english - hope someone can understand my problem :-)

I have an OR-Container which contains 2 items and 3 other containers so the user can choose one of these 5. This works fine and during the last 2 years thousands of DCRs has been created.
But now each of the two items should be wrapped up in another container because an additional input field is necessary for both.

Changing the DCT by writing a container-tag around both items is very simple of course but how can I avoid losing all the existing data?

Well, one possibility is to write a PERL script which changes all existing DCRs. But I want to avoid this because the whole DCT is very tricky and so I'm afraid of making DCRs invalid.

So I try to do it by FormAPI.
At first I add the two new containers to the DCT without removing the 2 existing items. When a DCR is opened, I search for the OR-Container recursively. If I find it and one of the two items is selected, i want to change the choise to one of the new containers and copy the value of the old item into the first item of the new container. That's my plan but the problem is that I can not change the container item choice. I try it with:
IWItem.addInstance()
but the return value is undefined.

Doesn't work the method for OR-Containers or is it my fault? Or do you have an other idea solving my problem?

Just ask, if you don't understand what I've written! I can also attach something if needed.

Thanks for your help!

nipper

I have looked at this and the perl script is about the only solution. I tried the hidden field, populate the new field, but never liked the solution.

The good news is that TeamSite does version control, so you have the ability to recover from a bad script.

Start writing your script with a copy of the 2000 DCRs and another script that will parse the newly generated DCR log the moved fields and compare to previous DCRs. Test run it as many times as you can on a variety of DCRs. Tell your users they have a content freeze for a day. Cut an edition, make certain all DCRs are submitted. Run your script and do a full site regen. If everything looks good, submit.

There is no easy way.