Thursday 10 December 2009

InfoPath 2007 - Conditional values in InfoPath using XPath

I had a question today regarding Infopath and making conditional statements in Xpath:

Question

Hi Guys,
I was wondering if any of you have tried doing an if then else using xpath.
What I am trying to do is use a formula on an infopath form control.
This is what I want
If(field1 = “x”)
Then “1”
Else “2”
Ive had a look at some forums and you can do this with xpath2.0 but im using infopath2007 which I think uses xpath1.0
The work around seems to be something like this which I cant seem to get working either.
Concat(substring("1", 1, field1=”x” * string-length("1")), substring("2", 1, not(field1=”x”) * string-length("2")))
Any ideas would be great.
thanks


Answer

There are 2 options for this:
  1. You can use Conditional Statements within Rules e.g. on a text box to set the value conditionally in another field (much simpler than Xpath workarounds)
  2. You can use Xpath to give conditional results (effectively an "if" or "iif"). To implement the example in the question above, you could put this into an expression box (make sure "Xpath(Advanced)" is checked on):

    concat(substring("1", 1, (my:FieldA = "x") * string-length("1")), substring("2", 1, (not(my:FieldA = "x")) * string-length("2")))

The problem with the Xpath in the original question was that the parentheses were not in the correct positions. For more info on option 2, you can see http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2006/11/27/conditional-default-values.aspx

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