Re: [libreoffice-users] If-exist condition for conditional text or section

Hi Michael,

With the help of Dave Howorth's links to the OpenDocument spec, I just spent a couple hours trying 
to track down and understand your references, and realize that I am:
 (a) in over my head (even just to understanding the relevance of the different files organized 
under v.1.2), and
 (b) nowhere near a solution to how to test if a field is empty for the purpose of controlling 
conditional text.

[Indeed, I could not even see the connection between the schema for text:condition and my 
understanding of Writer's conditional text functions. It appears that working through the spec 
would take months -- and even then I'm not sure I would see the relationship to LO program design 
and functionality. (I wonder if that does not reflect your own experience, as you described it.)]

Thank you so much for the education in LO design, which I will mark to study further, but I can't 
afford to study it further now. I'm afraid I will have to accept that LO Writer cannot (for now) do 
what I thought it might do.

Kind regards,
John


On 2021-01-01 15:46, Michael H wrote:
> John,
>
> To follow up on the conditions aren't really conditional, but static
> states: I got as far as page 613 of the ODF 1.2 specification.  (which used
> to be free from OASIS, but now costs chf198 from ISO.org.)
>
> it says
>
> "The text:condition attribute specifies a condition. Conditions do not have
> a predefined
> syntax, but the attribute value should begin with a namespace prefix,
> followed by a ":" (U+003A,
> COLON) separator, followed by the text of a formula. The namespace bound to
> the prefix
> determines the syntax and semantics of the formula."
>
> But all my attempts to make this work within Libreoffice writer failed. LO
> Writer evaluated anything I put into <text:conditional-text> as pure text,
> not as a formula (as far as I could tell.)
>
> I was approaching from a differential analysis on .fodt documents before
> and after I made various changes, then studying ODF spec to determine what
> that field could actually do.
> There's clearly no interface to support this.  It's in the spec so there
> should be capability in LO Writer (or at least OpenOffice 2 & 3).. but
> regardless what program I tried, I continued to get similar results...
> regardless of what was in the <text:condition> attribute, i always got one
> of the two results unless the evaluation was strictly either "FALSE" or
> "TRUE" or some variant of capitalization of one of these. So wherever the
> actual statement was it was looking for a boolean result but a string
> result, which LO wasn't returning if the evaluation ever happened.
>
> So, I switched to Calc where I know how to do boolean logic, and each cell
> is visible realtime, so it doesn't take advanced forensics to see what is,
> and fix.


--
To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/
Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy