SetWebReturnURL After an XpressDox template has been run from within your own web application or website, the «SetWebReturnURL» command can be used to specify a result page i.e. where the browser should point now that the document has been assembled. The return URL can be written into the application via...

XpressDox has a powerful Relevance Engine which hides or shows controls (those areas where data for data elements are captured) on the interview. Take the following snippet: «ChooseFromRDBList(PartyType,Individual,Company)» The party is: «Name» and the «If(PartyType = ‘Individual’)»Identity Number is «IDNumber»«Else()»Company Number is «CompanyNumber» and Discount is «Discount»«End()» If the user chooses ‘Individual’...

This function is used mainly to get rid of empty paragraphs in a document. «ShowIfHasValue(AddressLine3)» will insert the value of the AddressLine3 data element only if that data element has a non-empty value.  If the value IS empty, then the entire paragraph containing the field is removed. Note that this...

The StartsWith function (an XSLT function) is used to test whether a string starts with a given string: «If(StartsWith(Surname,'van ')»«Title» «Surname» is probably of Dutch descent.«End()» «If(StartsWith(Surname,'van ')»«Setv('LastPart',substring-after(Surname,'van '))»«End()» In previous versions this command was known as starts-with. Backward compatibility ensures that XpressDox will still recognize this command.

The result of this function would typically not be included directly in the merged document, but would be used in a conditional, such as: If «When(StartsWithVowel(Fruit),an,a)» «Fruit» is ripe it tastes better than if it is rotten. The function assumes that ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’ and ‘u’ (and their uppercase...

Using a page break in a template is fairly straightforward, even when the page break is conditional. In other words, when the page break is to be included or excluded on the basis of an «If» command. For example: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. «If(Type = ‘Long’)»……………………………Page...

Calculations can give trouble when the data elements being operated on are not of the correct format. The RenderAsNumeric function will address that problem.

XpressDox Artefacts When a template runs, XpressDox creates a number of internal structures.  The most important of these is an XSLT Stylesheet.  The stylesheet contains the definition of how the data from an XML data set are to be inserted into the Word template in order to generate the merged...

SubstringBeforeLast and SubstringAfterLast These two functions help with manipulation of strings like file paths or IP addresses which have multiple occurrences of a delimiter. For the following examples, assume the data element DocFilePath contains ‘C:\Documents\XpressDox\WordFile.docx’. SubstringBeforeLast can be used to get the name of folder from a full file path,...

Templates with many data elements might result in data capture interviews being constructed by XpressDox which are intimidating to the template user. The Tab command assists the template author in laying out the data capture interview.

Data element names aren’t always obvious when looking at an interview, especially when you have the Caption command, or when using ChooseFromDataSource, or ChooseFromFile. And of course, it is crucial for you to know the data element names when troubleshooting templates.   And so the way to find out what...

Use this command to change the orientation of Tabs from horizontal (default) to vertical, or none.   Option 1: Horizontal: «TabOrientation(Horizontal)» The default. Not specifying any orientation of tabs would result in them being horizontal.     Option 2: Vertical: «TabOrientation(Vertical)» to orientate the tabs down the left hand side...

XpressDox has numerous string handling functions.  The number of different applications is vast, and this article tries to provide a number of situations all in one place. Extract the last few characters of a string Suppose you have a situation where a particular data element will always contain a specific code in...

The TableLookup function enables the calculation of an amount from a table. Typically this is used with tax tables, or other tables of tariffs. The normal tax calculation for South Africa for the 2008/09 tax year is based on this table (reproduced from the South African Revenue Services web site):...

A “foreign” template is a template marked up for use in another document assembly system, such as HotDocs®, GhostFill® or DealBuilder®/ContractExpress®.  The discussion below applies to HotDocs when using XpressDox versions prior to version 4, but after version 4 the discussion applies equally to GhostFill, DealBuilder and documents using Word...

Use this function to put the file name of the currently running template into the assembled document. For example: The name of this template file is «TemplateName()» To include the extension and full file path of the template, use the following: The name of this template file is «TemplateName('true','true')»

Generic documents such as contracts often have numerous places where the construct “his/her” appears, or perhaps “his” is used in the document and a preamble has words to the effect of  “masculine usage includes feminine and singular includes plural”. With document assembly, and XpressDox in particular, the template can provide...

Templates authored in HotDocs®, GhostFill® and other document assembly systems can, with varying degrees of certainty, be converted to run successfully with XpressDox. Why this works In principle, almost any delimiters can be used by XpressDox as fillpoint delimiters. For historic reasons, the « and » pair were chosen as...

PDF forms which contain fillable fields can be populated with XpressDox data PDF documents which have been prepared with PDF Form Fields (using a suitable PDF Form editor) can be filled with data captured with an XpressDox interview. In fact, the PDF form can be filled with data from ANY...

The Conditional Capture feature of XpressDox will automatically hide merge fields on the data capture interview. This happens when the document assembly logic in the template renders a data element to be irrelevant in a particular situation.

This article looks at using the XpressDox Explorer rather than the Windows Explorer in the Desktop add-in implementation. There are many benefits which you may miss out on if you stick to using the Windows Explorer.   Windows Explorer By default the Explorer you get when you click Open, Save...

When running a template in XpressDox (i.e. in the Word add-in), you are interacting with five phases of processing. These are:     When you click Run Template the following 2 steps apply:   1. Template normalisation. This process consists of merging the templates referred to in «BaseTemplate()» and «IncludeTemplate()»...

Using scripts when filling PDF forms need to be done in a certain way   When you are defining a PDF form field map in the Prepare PDF Form UI, you can specify that the source for a particular PDF field is either a data element, or a script. If...

You want people to be able to run a template that you have made, but don’t want anyone other than yourself to read or modify the template.  This can be achieved by encrypting the template. A template can be encrypted when saving it in the XpressDox Explorer.  When saving a...

The Document per Repeated Item feature can also be filtered so that only those repeated items fulfilling a particular set of criteria will have a document prepared.