Last PositionBy Tim Dexter on Aug 21, 2008I have seen quite a few templates recently that are using our updatable variables to keep a track of the current record being processed. Regular readers will know my dislike for the updatable variables. Don't get me wrong, they have their place ... sometimes. It might be the way you set the dang things up that annoys me so much and I should take some blame for not chasing the dev team up to simplify the declaration and retrievel. Here's the code to define and assign a value to a variable x:
now lets update the variable, adding 10 and then show it
Too much right? Imagine using them to track the number of the current record. Folks are doing this in their templates. There is no need - the underlying standard for RTF templates is XSL and it has some neat native functions that can be used to track the current record and the last record.
position()- will return the current record counter. In XSL it starts at 1
last()- will return the last record counter
For some examples I indebted to Chris from UK Oracle Consulting. Chris will be out at Oracle World again this year so if you would like to hear how the Queen's English should be spoken drop by the demo grounds. I seem to have developed some mid-atlantic drawl - my family in the UK think Im lost to those danged Yankees! I do still pronounce butter with t's rather than d's but my kids are struggling to understand me when I ask for a 'glass of water' rather than 'wadder'. Enough language mangling already! Back to Chris' examples. He came up with the following XML data.
123
456
789
and some examples of position() and last()
.//LIST_G_ORDER_HEADERS/G_ORDER_HEADERS[HEADER_ID = '123']/position() RETURNS '1'
//LIST_G_ORDER_HEADERS/G_ORDER_HEADERS[position() = last()]/HEADER_ID RETURNS '789'
.//LIST_G_ORDER_HEADERS/G_ORDER_HEADERS[last()]/HEADER_ID RETURNS '789'
.//LIST_G_ORDER_HEADERS/G_ORDER_HEADERS[position() != last()]/HEADER_ID RETURNS '123' and '456'
.//LIST_G_ORDER_HEADERS/G_ORDER_HEADERS[2]/HEADER_ID RETURNS '456'
You'll have noticed the [ ] - these contain what are know as XPATH expressions. They are very powerful and well worth taking a look at - I'll try and cover XPATH more than we do in the documentation.
Update
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Leslie, our fab doc writer has just pointed out that I should have stated:
I will work with the doc writer to get some more in the documentationI'll also try and get some more in here in the meantime :)You can of course use them both in a conditional statement too:
Last Record!
Chris' third example is doing something similar but its using the condition within an XPATH expression, G_ORDER_HEADERS[position() != last()] - inside those square braces you do not need the 'if'.So, throw out those updatable variable whenever you can and get native!
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