A tough little question appeared on one of our internal mailing lists today that piqued my interest. A customer wanted to place a border around all data fields in their BIP output. Something like this:
Naturally you think of using a table, embedding the field inside a cell and turning the cell border on. That will work but will need some finessing to get the cells to stretch or shrink depending on the width of the runtime text. Then things might get a bit squirly (technical term) if the text is wide enough to force a new line at the page edge. Anyway, it will get messy. So I took a look at the problem to see if the fields can be isolated in the page as far as the XSLFO code is concerned. If the field can be siolated in its own XSL block then we can change attribute values to get the borders to show just around the field. Sadly not.
This is an embedded field YEARPARAM in a sentence.
translates to
<fo:inline height="0.0pt" style-name="Normal" font-size="11.0pt" style-id="s0" white-space-collapse="false" font-family-generic="swiss" font-family="Calibri" xml:space="preserve">This is an embedded field <xsl:value-of select="(.//YEARPARAM)[1]" xdofo:field-name="YEARPARAM"/> in a sentence.</fo:inline>
If we change the border on tis, it will apply to the complete sentence. not just the field.
So how could I isolate that field. Well we could actually do anything to the field. embolden, italicize, etc ... I settled on changing the background color (its easy to change it back with a single attribute call.) Using the highlighter tool on the Home tab in Word I change the field to have a yellow background. I now have:
This gives me the following code.
<fo:block linefeed-treatment="preserve" text-align="start" widows="2" end-indent="5.4pt" orphans="2"
start-indent="5.4pt" height="0.0pt" padding-top="0.0pt" padding-bottom="10.0pt" xdofo:xliff-note="YEARPARAM" xdofo:line-spacing="multiple:13.8pt"> <fo:inline height="0.0pt" style-name="Normal" font-size="11.0pt" style-id="s0" white-space-collapse="false"
font-family-generic="swiss" font-family="Calibri" xml:space="preserve">This is an embedded field </fo:inline><fo:inline height="0.0pt" style-name="Normal" font-size="11.0pt" style-id="s0" white-space-collapse="false"
font-family-generic="swiss" font-family="Calibri" background-color="#ffff00"><xsl:attribute name="background-color">white</xsl:attribute> <xsl:value-of select="(.//YEARPARAM)[1]" xdofo:field-name="YEARPARAM"/> </fo:inline> <fo:inline height="0.0pt" style-name="Normal" font-size="11.0pt" style-id="s0" white-space-collapse="false"
font-family-generic="swiss" font-family="Calibri" xml:space="preserve"> in a sentence.</fo:inline> </fo:block> Now we have the field isolated we can easily set other attributes that will only be applied to the field and nothing else. I added the following to my YEARPARAM field:
<?attribute@inline:background-color;'white'?> >>> turn the background back to white
<?attribute@inline:border-color;'black'?> >>> turn on all borders and make black
<?attribute@inline:border-width;'0.5pt'?> >>> make the border 0.5 point wide
<?YEARPARAM?> >>> my original field
The @inline tells the BIP XSL engine to only apply the attribute values to the immediate 'inline' code block i.e. the field. Collapse all of this code into a single line in the field.
When I run the template now, I see the following:
Its a little convoluted but if you ignore the geeky code explanation and just highlight/copy'n'paste, its pretty straightforward.