InfoPath Dev

Hey All,

Is there a way to concatinate each field in a repeating table such as:

repeatingtable1:
-------------------
[Field1]"This"
[Field1]"is"
[Field1]"a"
[Field1]"test"
wich would result in a field displaying "This is a test"?

Thanks Guys!!!

Hi WCOTech,
Yes! This is easy. Just use the Concat function to calculate the value for the display field. Double click on the field that you want to display the concatenated string. Click on Fx button and then Insert Function. Select Text and then Concat. Click OK insert the fields as paramters. You'll have to play with it to get it to work with repeating fields, and there might be a challenge getting it to concat a variable length. Good luck!

Patrick Halstead [InfoPath MVP]
InfoPathDev

Thanks for the response Patrick,
I know that you can use the Concat function in to yield the following:
repeating table
---------------
[field1]="1" [field2]="2"

concat([field1],[field2)

Result: "12"

But I want to concatinate all occurances of the same field together. I'm requesting this to be able to group a list of email addresses together to use for an email field.

Thanks!

Hiya,
You might be able to do something sneakily recursive in XPath, but this really seems like a call for some simple code. Just an OnAfterChange loop with Concat ought to suffice. Recreate it every time. You could be clever and look for a way to just insert the new or delete the old, but that's too hard and won't yield much perf gains. Anyway, good luck on your coding.

Patrick Halstead [InfoPath MVP]
InfoPathDev

Hi, 'been looking around the forum and I found this old thread... This is exactly what I am trying to do! But so far, the statement I managed to construct using rules only gets the first row. Is there an easy way of doing this through rules or do I really have to use looping with managed code/script. Thanks.

Mike Olea
InfoPathNoob

With a repeating table of varying size this would be very hard to do with rules (if not impossible). The code would be really easy, check this out:

function getEmails()
{
	var list = XDocument.DOM.selectNodes( "//my:repeatingTable/my:email" );
	var str = "";

	while( node = list.nextNode() )
	{
		str += node.text + "; ";
	}
	
	return str;
}

---------------
Matt Faus

Ok. Guess I'll go with code then! Thanks Matt!

Mike Olea
InfoPathNoob

hi!

i got the same problem, but it seems my scripting skills are too poor to get this thing working. - how should the code be called? (onAfterChange ?)

currently i got:

function msoxd_my_packageTitle::OnBeforeChange(eventObj) {
   var list = XDocument.DOM.selectNodes( "//my:workPackages/my:section/my:packageTitle" ); // <- the repeating fields
   var str = "";
   while( node = list.nextNode() ) {
          str += node.text + "; "; }
   var target = XDocument.DOM.selectSingleNode( "//my:wpDescriptions" ); // <- the field where the condensed string should go
   target.text = str;
}

and i get the error:

InfoPath cannot complete this action because of an error in the form's code.
The following error occurred:

InfoPath cannot update the data because the form is currently read-only.
File:script.js
Line: 35

 

... can somebody help me?

I cannot help you with that but my advice is :

point which line is line 35 so that when the guys in USA will watch your question, they will not have to ask.

And therefore, you might gain 1 day :) 

This InfoPath Team blog post could be exactly what you are looking for:

http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2006/04/05/569338.aspx

It's entitled "loops in formulas" :)

thank you! that worked just perfect.. :D

This referenced blog solution works well for emails [  eval(eval(person, "concat(my:email, ';')"), "..")  ] but when you concatenate fields that are to be displayed on the form you're left with the separator (comma, semi-colon or whatever) at the end of the text.

Is there a way to eliminate the last separator character?