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I lied, I haven't received your email yet (or at least as far as I can tell). Did you send it to bryce@sysonyx.com ?

-BKN

Ahhhhh, this makes a LOT more sense to me now. First, let me define what ENDLINE means, and that will clarify a lot I think.

ENDLINE was a *very* specific feature added on the request of one of our users. In a custom flatfile they used, their Order "blocks" would start with an Order line, have a bunch of OrderDetail lines, and then have this "END" line. It was a separate line all on it's own, with no other qualifying identifier. So their documents looked something like:

Order,122,Fred Barnes,1532 N. Way Dr.
OrderDetail,1,59.95,10,3384
OrderDetail,2,34.50,3,201
OrderDetail,3,199.23,1,773
END
Order,124,... etc
OrderDetail,1,...etc
OrderDetail,2,...etc
END

That "END" line was just an annomoly that the only way we could figure a good work around was to have a special property that told xmlLinguist that this "Line" was a block of lines and at the very end, there would be a special, unidentifiable line that contained a string literal, in this case "END".

So, for 99% of the cases out there, the EndLine property means *nothing*. Don't use it! Ignore it! Completely!

For your solution, there are three ways we can do this:
A) as you identified, have a simple field at the very end that's nothing but an Asterix,
B) make your filler field AlignRight and pass it a single asterix (instead of a blank node) or
C) Make the LineDelimeter of the Document be the *+CR+LF like I mentioned in an earlier post.

Probably the easiest thing will be that middle option. In your XML Stylesheet, when you create your special, "blank" filler node, give it a value of "*". In xmlLinguist, make that Filler node Align property to "Right" and make sure the PadChar is blank or a space. Then when the engine runs, it will pad out to the width of the field and put that asterix at the very end.

Oh, and btw, since this is a FixedWidth document, ALL properties of a Field are now valid

Lemme know how that works for you.

-BKN

no worries, XSL takes a while to get used to, and I recommend picking up a reference book, maybe from O'Reilly. There are plenty of good websites too, and there's a very active mailing list. Check out www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/ for details.

As for the IF conditional, there is indeed and here's a sample:

<xsl:if test="XPATHEXPRESSION">
(your code here)
</xsl:if>

The tricky part with xsl:if is understanding how XPath works. That's a topic in-and-of-itself, do a google on XPath tutorials. Quick and dirty, think of your XML elements as folders on a unix box. The test to see if something exists will look like ParentNode/ChildNode. XPath typically keys off of the "current" node too. So if you're in a loop construct, either as a Template that was passed, or in an xsl:for-each, then remember that ParentNode is probably already there, so you won't have to have any slashes.

Probably what you will want is <xsl:if test="TheNameOfTheNodeThatAppearsOnlySometimes">. Tinker with it in XRay and let me know how it goes.

-BKN

No, it's quite simple. The problem isn't xsl:if, it's your understanding of XPath. The @test attribute takes an XPath parameter. This, like I said, is very tricky to wrap your mind around and is probably the most tricky part of XSL. Do some searches on that and you'll be in better shape.

To answer your problem directly, what you want is :

<xsl:if test="ClaimNotesInfo/ClaimNotes != ''">
</xsl:if>

This will test the value of the ClaimNotes element, and if it's an empty string, the test will fail and the code inbetween the IF won't get called.

Notet that we have double-quotes on the outside and two single quotes after the !=

-BKN

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