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18-Opal
bfriesen18-Opal
18-Opal
March 19, 2013
Question

ufe: with a X-path question (newbee)

  • March 19, 2013
  • 3 replies
  • 933 views

The problem I am having is the mainbooktitle does show the tm element when publsihing to pdf. We had a style sheet created for us. They add the text to the cover using a _ufe with a x-path reference (/RDStyle/ResolvedMap/servicemanualmap/booktitle/mainbooktitle) in it. My limited understanding of this is that it is going to publish whatever is seen in the mainbooktitle element. So I should also expect that the tm element should also be displayed?


any help would be great


Thanks


Bryon

    3 replies

    C
    ClayHelberg18-Opal
    18-Opal
    March 19, 2013
    Hi Bryon--



    It depends on how it is specified. If it is specified as an XPath
    *string*, then no, it won't include the TM element. When an XPath node
    is specified and the string value is requested, it is the concatenation
    of descendant text nodes. Any child elements are stripped out.



    If it's specified as Insert Element Content->by XPath, then that should
    preserve the child elements of the target node, so that should do what
    you want.



    --Clay



    Clay Helberg

    Senior Consultant



    TerraXML

    1380 Forest Park Circle, Suite 100

    Lafayette, CO 80027
    B
    18-Opal
    bfriesen18-OpalAuthor
    18-Opal
    March 19, 2013

    Hmm my manual title has this line in it. By the xpathstring expr, I take it that this is a a xpath string.


    <_gte:XPathString expr="/RDStyle/ResolvedMap/servicemanualmap/*[name()='bookmeta' or name()='servicemanualmeta']/modelno"/><_dtd:_newline/><_gte:XPathString expr="/RDStyle/ResolvedMap/servicemanualmap/booktitle/mainbooktitle"/>


    I went into the _ufe and copied the path then went to insert element Content, by xpath and pasted (/RDStyle/ResolvedMap/servicemanualmap/booktitle/mainbooktitle)into the Xpath expression. It now behaves as it should. Is there any reason why you would not want a xpath to pass on child elements?


    Thank you Clay.


    Bryon

    C
    ClayHelberg18-Opal
    18-Opal
    March 19, 2013
    Hi Bryon--



    Sure, there are plenty of instances where you want the text content of
    an element and not its markup content. For example, you would want this
    if you are assigning the content of an element as an attribute value
    somewhere else. But beyond that, XPath strings and XPath nodesets
    (element content) are two fundamentally different things. You use a
    string when you literally want a just a string of text. You use a
    nodeset when you want to include processing of the child elements of the
    target node (as in your use case).



    XPath works on an in-memory DOM tree, so it doesn't have any concept of
    markup strings. So there's no way it can get from "a mainbooktitle node
    with a child tm node" to a string like "my booktitle<tm type="reg"/">".
    XPath has no way of knowing how to transform a <tm> element into text to
    include it in a string.



    Keep in mind that XPath is a general language for selecting content from
    a structured document; it was born completely independently of Arbortext
    and Styler. In fact, it's primary usage is in XSLT transformation
    stylesheets. So, when thinking about "why does it work that way?", you
    have to consider more general cases beyond how it is used in Styler.



    --Clay



    Clay Helberg

    Senior Consultant



    TerraXML

    1380 Forest Park Circle, Suite 100

    Lafayette, CO 80027
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