[oXygen-user] What is "When this XPath expression is true" action parameter relative to?

Tue Feb 26 21:31:59 CST 2013

Thanks George,

That's an interesting idea, but when I tried it, I found that the invisible
gif I used was not invisible in the editor. It might work if I used one that
matched my background color. However, the 2 second delay that you mention,
and which I observed, make it not really usable.

In any case, it is still quite a convoluted way to achieve something I think
should be simple if you want to create an input form interface rather than a
traditional document interface, which, as you know, is something I advocate
strongly.

I don't know what the answer is -- a custom CSS selector, a schema-aware
fragment insert operation that greys the button if the insert would be
invalid, a deactivate-button action -- but I think something is needed to
complete the promise of the brilliant forms capability you have created.

Thanks,

Mark 

-----Original Message-----
From: George Cristian Bina [mailto:george at oxygenxml.com] 
Sent: February-26-13 6:16 PM
To: Mark Baker
Cc: oxygen-user at oxygenxml.com
Subject: Re: [oXygen-user] What is "When this XPath expression is true"
action parameter relative to?

Hi Mark,

There is an oxy_xpath() extension function (not a selector) that can be used
to get an interesting behavior. I still use my section/title example below
so you should adapt this to your actual elements:

section:before {
     content:
         oxy_button(
             actionID, oxy_xpath('if (./title) then "delete.title" else
"add.title"'), transparent, true); }

So, basically I can use the oxy_xpath() function to dynamically create the
action name based on an XPath condition, in this case I check if a title
child element exists or not, but you can have any complex XPath
2.0 expression there and cascade multiple if statements if needed.

The only issue right now is that it takes about 2 seconds for the action to
change into the other after it is invoked - we probably need to look into
speeding that up - but the functionality is there and it should cover your
use case.

To get the action disappear I think that instead of the delete action you
can define an action that does not do anything and that has a small
invisible icon and return that action instead of the delete one, but I have
not tested this.

Best Regards,
George
--
George Cristian Bina
<oXygen/> XML Editor, Schema Editor and XSLT Editor/Debugger
http://www.oxygenxml.com

On 2/26/13 9:44 PM, Mark Baker wrote:
> Hi George,
>
> Thanks for the wonderfully detailed response. This information 
> definitely needs to be in the documentation.
>
> Here's what I am trying to do. I have an element <operational-failure> 
> that has a compulsory element <description>, and an optional element 
> <occurrence>. In my CSS, I have a button attached to 
> operational-failure:after that allows the author to add an 
> <occurrence> element.
>
> The occurrence element is allowed only once, so once the occurrence 
> element had been added, I would like to do one of the following, in 
> order of
> preference:
>
> * Hide the button altogether.
> * Disable the button (grey it out).
> * Display an informative message when the button is pressed.
>
> Because the <operational-failure> element is not empty, the empty 
> selector doesn't seem to help me achieve the first option.
>
> Putting in an XPath test of "not(occurrence)" does not give me the 
> second option (greying out the button), but it does give me the third 
> option, in a generic way. But the message is not really appropriate 
> for use with a button. It says:
>
> "The action +occurrence is not available in the current location"
>
> That would make sense if the user was selecting an action from a menu, 
> and had placed their caret where they want the action to occur. With a 
> button, though, the user does not know that an "action" is being 
> invoked, and they have no control over the location where the action 
> takes place -- that is dictated by the button.  So the message does 
> not really tell the user why the button action can't be completed.
>
> Actually, the message they get without the button action being 
> disabled is actually more informative, because then they get the 
> "element not allowed at this location" dialog.
>
> Neither of these is really satisfactory, though, because it is a 
> universal interface convention that if an operation is unavailable, 
> the button/menu that performs it should either be hidden or unavailable
(greyed-out).
>
> I haven't got my head around the XSLT Operation yet, so I'm not sure 
> if it provides a solution.
>
> What I can suggest as ways to address this class of problem are:
>
> * an oXygen CSS extension for selecting elements based on their child 
> elements
>
> * if a button is attached to an unavailable action, grey out the 
> button
>
> * provide a way to specify a custom message when an action is not 
> available in a particular context
>
> Thanks for your help,
>
> Mark
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: George Cristian Bina [mailto:george at oxygenxml.com]
> Sent: February-26-13 1:45 PM
> To: Mark Baker
> Cc: oxygen-user at oxygenxml.com
> Subject: Re: [oXygen-user] What is "When this XPath expression is true"
> action parameter relative to?
>
> Hi Mark,
>
> As you move the caret in the document the element that contains the 
> caret becomes the current element where that XPath expression is
evaluated.
>
> Let's assume we have a section element that should contain a title 
> element and we define an add.title action that adds the title element 
> in the section. We can do this using the
>
> ro.sync.ecss.extensions.commons.operations.InsertFragmentOperation
>
> with the following parameters:
>
> Fragment: <title></title>
> Insert location: ancestor-or-self::section Insert position: Inside as 
> first child
>
> and we can make this action available when we are inside a section, by 
> setting the "when this XPath expression is true" field to
>
> ancestor-or-self::section
>
> Now, if the section defines only one title then we can enhance the 
> condition to
>
> ancestor-or-self::section[not(title)]
>
> and the action will become active only when the caret is in a section 
> without a title.
>
> When an action is contributed to the Author page though the 
> oxy_button() CSS extension function then the context for the XPath 
> expression is the element on which we added the button.
>
> For example, we can add this action on the before pseudo-element of a 
> section, like below:
>
> section:before {
>       content:
>           oxy_button(
>               actionID, "add.title", transparent, true);
>
> This will add the title element on a section without a title and on a 
> section with title it will give a message that the action is not 
> available anymore in that context - we disable the action on the 
> toolbar when it is not available but this was not implemented when the 
> actions are added inline in the author.
>
> In version 14.2 we added support for :empty selectors so you may want 
> to see if that is useful for your use case. For example if I modify 
> the above CSS rule to match an empty section
>
> section:empty {
>       content:
>           oxy_button(
>               actionID, "add.title", transparent, true); }
>
> then the behavior is nice, as I get a button if the section is empty, 
> I press the button and I get the title while the button disappears.
>
> Another thing that you may want to investigate is the XSLTOperation.
> This allows you to use an XSLT stylesheet to specify what the 
> operation will actually do. The XSLT script can be something like
>
> <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
>     version="2.0">
>     <xsl:include href="scripts/action1.xsl"/> </xsl:stylesheet>
>
> and the include will be resolved relative to the framework file 
> location, so then you will add in your framework folder
>
> scripts/action1.xsl
>
> and edit that stylesheet to actually implement the processing you want.
> The advantage of doing this is that you can interactively develop and 
> test the action: you can change the action1.xsl, save it, invoke the 
> action in the XML document the Author mode, undo if you are not happy 
> with the result, change the XSLT file again, try again the action, and so
on.
>
> Maybe if you can provide some more details about what you want to do 
> we can provide better advise.
>
> Best Regards,
> George
> --
> George Cristian Bina
> <oXygen/> XML Editor, Schema Editor and XSLT Editor/Debugger 
> http://www.oxygenxml.com
>
> On 2/26/13 7:07 PM, Mark Baker wrote:
>> What is the "When this XPath expression is true" parameter of an 
>> action definition evaluated relative to? The docs just say "an XPath 
>> expression that applies to elements and attributes;" but they don't 
>> say what the current element is at the time the xpath is evaluated.
>>
>> My reason for asking is this: I want to create a button to add an 
>> element to a document. But since this element is only allowed once 
>> inside its parent element, I would like the button to either 
>> disappear or be disabled if the parent element already contains the 
>> element that the button inserts.
>>
>> Ideally, I would like to do this using the stylesheet to remove the 
>> button when the child element already exists, but CSS does not 
>> provide a selector for an element that contains (or does not contain) 
>> another element, so there does not seem to be a way to do that. 
>> (Enhancement request for an Oxygen CSS extension for this purpose)
>>
>> So since that does not work, my next approach is to invalidate the 
>> button if the child element already exists. To do this, I think I 
>> would need the "When this XPath expression is true" parameter to be 
>> evaluated relative to the path specified in the "insertLocation"
>> parameter, but that does not seem to be how it works.
>>
>> So, what is the current element when "When this XPath expression is 
>> true" parameter is evaluated.
>>
>> And, more generally, can anyone think of a way to do what I am trying 
>> to do here?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Mark
>>
>>
>>
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