I know this is a classic difficulty with XMLC, but I suspect
there’s a better solution out there than I’ve seen so far:
The issue is how to suppress an element (with children) on
one table row (say the first) and have it re-appear on subsequent table rows?
I see several options:
1. generate the element programmatically,
and only add it to the DOM tree for the rows in which it needs to appear
2. have the element in the
mockup. Clone it before your loop
begins and remove it from the tree.
Insert the clone back when necessary. Pro: this keeps the mockup in it’s desired role: as the source of the element. Con:
I can’t get this to work! (DOM006 errors)
3. somehow disable the element for
one row only, so it stays in the tree but doesn’t get inserted in the
page. I don’t know if this is
supported, but I think this would be the ideal extension to XMLC.
And a related question:
My loops to iterate thru table rows typically look like:
page.getElementTableRow();
while(…)
{
//
modify table row as needed
table.appendChild(templateRow.cloneNode(true));
}
I do the cloning at the end because the only way to use the
nifty XMLC-generated accessor methods (getElementXXX())
is to access them from the page. Having these accessors
seems the primary value of XMLC, and traversing the DOM manually seems to
undermine the argument for using XMLC at all. If somehow XMLC could generate an object
for the row itself, with methods for the row’s child elements, this would
no longer be necessary.
The downside is that I cannot remove elements from the
template row temporarily.
Do others typically clone at the end of the loop, or do you clone
at the beginning and then traverse the DOM of the cloned row manually?
Thx!
--
David Michaels <dkm@xxxxxxx>
Director of Web Engineering
PGP Corporation (650) 319-9009
