That’s OK, it happens to all of us. ;)

For the record, when creating a data connection based on sample XML data, you’re really creating a Schema Data Connection whereby Designer interprets the XML data and extrapolates a schema based on its structure. So creating a Schema Data Connection and one based on “sample XML data” essentially results in the same type of data connection.

By “n levels deep”, do you mean your XML may look like this:

<data>
    <node1 name="L1">
        <property1/>
        <property2/>
        <property3/>
    </node1>
</data>

or like this:

<data>
    <node1 name="L1">
        <node2 name="L2">
            <node3 name="L3">
                <property1/>
                <property2/>
                <property3/>
            </node3>
        </node2>
    </node1>
</data>

and you would like to have one subform (or subform set) capable of binding to the element that contains the <propertyX> nodes, regardless of its depth in the data?

If so, I’m sorry to say that I don’t believe this is possible with simple data bindings since it would imply that you are dynamically changing the binding expression on the subform/Set which is currently not allowed.

You could achieve it using script, however, by not binding the subform/Set to data and inspecting the data upon initialization (the data will be loaded in xfa.datasets.data). At this point, you can access the XML structure and “manually” create subform instances, populating instances with data as appropriate.

I know it sounds very awkward, and it is! We’re definitely thinking of ways to make this sort of thing easier in the future.

I just thought I’d post back and confess to user error regarding the template. My template now works as intended.

One remaining question I have–and I havent seen a tutorial about this anywhere: how do you create a dynamic template that can call subform sets programmatically instead of by xpath? As I mentioned above, our XML data can be n levels deep. To get my template working I hardwired each subform set to distinct level of nodes in the XML data and my templates can only support a depth of ten levels. Ideally we’d be able to render a subform set recursively for any node or condition in our XML.

I’d love to see a tutorial on this ;)

thx
Paul

Thanks for this informative article. My company is an Adobe Solutions Provider and I am working on a template to display data from a complicated/nested XML data source. All of the examples I’ve seen for rendering data from external XML files are 1 or two levels deep. We need to design a flexible template that can handle n levels of data.

I’ve been building my template using a sample XML file as both a preview source and data binding and have created a few fields that are bound to this source. The problem Im having is that no matter what I do I cant get more than 2 levels of data to render in my form. Is there some inherent limitation when binding data to XML instead of XSD/schema?

If you’re willing Im happy to send/post my template and data source for a future tutorial ;)

Thanks again and kind regards,
Paul

You two comments seem to be asking the same basic question about this unbound data node whose value you need to get within a repeating data set.

Each form object that is bound to data has a “dataNode” property that you can use to access its underlying data node in the Data DOM. Since the checkbox isn’t bound to data but the parent (repeating) subform is, you can use an expression like this one to get the value of the VISIBLE data node inside the instance of the repeating data group node bound to the current instance of the repeating subform:

this.parent.dataNode.VISIBLE.value;

Please see my response to your original comment on the other post.

I’m backlogged about 10 days with comments to respond to at the moment which is why I hadn’t yet responded to your first one.

I have already posted this question in instance manager category. I haven’t seen any activity in that category since april, i am reposting the same question here again, though this topic does not belong to this section.

I have a form with 5 paragraphs. I wrapped each paragraph in a subform(sf1, sf2, sf3, sf4), also wrapped all these subforms in a flowed subform. Now, I want to hide and unhide these paragraphs based on a condition. This condition is sent through a payload XML.

Let us say, i have a sequence
1,2,3 sent in the payload XML to render the form. Based on this condition, I have to display first three paragraphs and I never had a problem to display this sequence.

Now if i have a sequence,
3,1,4.
How can i change the sequence of the paragraphs in a flowed subform?
All i know is, subforms in a flowed container are displayed in the order they are built in the hierarchy.

Can you please let me know whether my approach is correct or not? Also, can you give me a solution to change the sequence of the subforms in a flowed container.

Thanks in advance.

I have a repeating table row that is bound to data structure such as movie.data[*]. Within that row I have different UI elements such as checkbox, textinput, etc.
Depending on the value of movie.data[*].category I want to use just one of the UI elements.
(e.g. if category == “drama” make checkbox visible)
Therefore I want to use the initialize event of the table row and read the movie.data[*].category data.
Q: How do I access this data? I have used quite a number of statements, such as:

xfa.resolveNode(“$record.movie.data[*].category”).value
xfa.resolveNode(“category”).value
and many more, without success.

Basically I just want to have scripting access to the data of the structure my table row is bound to.

Thx a lot

I am struggeling with quite a nasty problem.

I have a repeating subform that is bound to structure/ table (ROOT.DATA[*]) such as in your article. In this subform there is a checkbox that is not bound to anything!
(Normal binding works! (without scripting) as I have used a Textfild that I have bound to data called “VISIBLE”)
However, in the initialize event of checkbox I need to access the element ROOT.DATA[*].VISIBLE using the data DOM by myself.
How can I accomblish that. As the the parrent subform repeates for each ROOT.DATA, I want to read the VISIBLE element of the current subform-instance in the initialize event of the checkbox.

I have tried:
xfa.resolveNode(“$record.ROOT.DATA[*].VISIBLE”).value
xfa.resolveNode(“ROOT.DATA[*].VISIBLE”).value
this.resolveNode(“VISIBLE”).value

and a looooooooot more fancy expressions.
I guess its not much of a problem, but I would be realy grateful.

Thx