Newbie Questions

Re: Slow View

murphythadog — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:49:16 GMT

Jimmy,

I wanted to report back and let you know all the help you gave me is working perfectly. I was able to build the form and had my admin input the data, we saved it as template.xml and it opens up and works way faster than my first attempt at the form. It streamlined even the building of the form. Now I'm off to part 2 once I correct a few little bits here and there.

Re: Slow View

murphythadog — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:03:44 GMT

Quick question, I'm now creating the new areas in my form for each section for instance:

Administration (Group)

Header (Group)
Areas (Group)
DptDGA (Group)

Education (Group)

I then referenced the Header/Areas/DptDGA from Admin to Edu. So then all my new referenced fields are still bound to Admin, I right click and bind to the new Groups under Employee Services. It removes the programming from them. Is there a way to keep the programming? I've been cutting and pasting but if I could force it to keep the programming it would save me a few steps. Luckily I'm down from manipulating 250+ fields from my old version to 25 fields in my new version.

Re: Slow View

murphythadog — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:44:40 GMT

That did it. I followed how you counted for the TNA and was able to set up a count for my new area DptDGA Autonumber. Thanks for all your help.

Re: Slow View

Jimmy — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:17:50 GMT

Ok, here ya go. The bold parts are the parts I added.

Table/LevelGroup/Autonumber → count(../preceding-sibling::*) + ../../../my:Autonumber + 1

Figure that for the first one [count(../preceding-sibling::*) = 0], it should be one more than RoomSpace's Autonumber, and so on

RoomSpace/Autonumber → count(../preceding-sibling::my:RoomSpace/my:Table/my:LevelGroup) + count(../preceding-sibling::my:RoomSpace) + count(../../../preceding-sibling::my:Areas/my:Rooms/my:RoomSpace/my:Table/my:LevelGroup) + count(../../../preceding-sibling::my:Areas/my:Rooms/my:RoomSpace) + count(../../../preceding-sibling::my:Areas/my:TNA) + count(../../../preceding-sibling::my:Areas/my:NGA) + count(../../../preceding-sibling::my:Areas/my:DGA) + 1

The blue part is the number of previous numbered rows in the same area and the red part is the number of numbered rows in previous areas.

TNA/Autonumber → ../../my:Rooms/my:RoomSpace/my:Autonumber + count(../../my:Rooms/my:RoomSpace) + count(../../my:Rooms/my:RoomSpace/my:Table/my:LevelGroup)

The starting number for the first RoomSpace in this area, plus the number of roomspaces and LevelGroups in this area.

DptDGA/Autonumber → ../../my:Areas[last()]/my:DGA/my:Autonumber + 1

One more than the autonumber value in the last Area's DGA.

Re: Slow View

murphythadog — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:42:13 GMT

Ok, one more and I think I won't have any questions for a while. The Autonumber for the new layout. I was trying to get it to work on my own, but it seems to return errors if I try to use preceding siblings for the new layout.

Edit: I added a new item DptDGA since It will sum up all the DGA's for each department.

Re: Slow View

Jimmy — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:13:38 GMT

Glad to hear that.

I wouldn't recommend that you both work on the form at the same time. That raises the risk of collisions between your changes and hers, but if there is back-and-forth, between her adding new values, sending it back to you, you changing the data source, passing it back, then it should work out ok.

Re: Slow View

murphythadog — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:06:37 GMT

That worked perfectly. Thanks Jimmy. I will be able to start building my form from here. I have an admin who is going to be filling out the data and saving the admin template. Should I have her hold off until I finish the whole thing in case changes are made, or is it ok for her to start saving the template.xml while I'm building out the rest of the form.

Re: Slow View

Jimmy — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:41:49 GMT

In that case, set AdminGroup/TableTitle/autoNumber to

count(../../preceding-sibling::my:AdminGroup) + count(../../preceding-sibling::my:AdminGroup/my:rooms) + count(../../preceding-sibling::my:AdminGroup/my:TNA) + count(../../preceding-sibling::my:AdminGroup/my:NGF) + count(../../preceding-sibling::my:AdminGroup/my:DGA) + 1

and AdminGroup/TNA/AutoNumber to

../../my:TableTitle/my:autoNumber + count(../../my:rooms) + 1

Leave everything else as-is, and that should do it.

Re: Slow View

murphythadog — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:15:29 GMT

Yes, each row is numbered, I will post a jpg, the form should number each row, and it was working before until I moved everything into the repeating section.

Re: Slow View

Jimmy — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:06:22 GMT

If you set AdminGroup/TableTitle/autoNumber's default value to this, does it behave how you expect? If not, could you describe how you want it to behave?

count(../../preceding-sibling::my:AdminGroup) + count(../../preceding-sibling::my:AdminGroup/my:rooms) + 1

Do you perhaps want every line numbered, including the rows with totals in them?

Re: Slow View

murphythadog — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:34:37 GMT

It looks like it works so far. I can see how my first attempt was surely a newb way. This forum is great. I will post what I have so far. I am going to work on my Surgery and Lab Areas since those seem to bog down the system the most to see if this helps. I'm a little perplexed on how to get my autonumber field to work right. I had it working up until I introduced the repeating section.

Re: Slow View

Jimmy — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:07:37 GMT

Yes that should work. You can have something like this:

Surgery
   departmentFloorSpace (field, non-repeating)
   areas (group, repeating)
      areaName (field, non-repeating)
      areaFloorSpace (field, non-repeating)
      rooms (group, repeating)
         autoNumber, etc.

And plenty of other possibilities. Yet again, you can reference this "areas" node type if you have more than one department with several areas.

And don't be afraid to re-use (reference) field names that you're already using in the elsewhere in the data source, using the method I described earlier (right-click, etc.). Your data source could even look like this:

Surgery
   totalArea
   areas (group, repeating)
      autoNumber
      areaName
      totalArea
      rooms (group, repeating)
         autoNumber
         roomName
         totalArea
         ...

Here Surgery, areas, and rooms all have a field called totalArea, and areas and rooms both have a field called autoNumber, but the fields each serve their own logistical purpose based on their place in the datasource, so they still make sense.

Re: Slow View

murphythadog — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:44:03 GMT

Now that I'm getting deeper into this newer version of my form I have a couple of questions. Say I have an area with multiple room types like in my surgery group. Can I do a repeating section with my repeating table inside of it, feel it out and save it as the template?

Re: Slow View

Jimmy — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:27:12 GMT

Yes, it would be nice if you could populate static text from a secondary data source just like that, but I'm afraid that there's no way to copy repeating data without code. Anyway, good luck with the method I described, and let me know if we should start exploring other options.

Re: Slow View

murphythadog — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:16:33 GMT

I had put that rule in because I wanted to test a data connection to an external Access Database that i couldn't get to work. hopeing to populate those static text boxes with the data from the database. it never really works for some reason. maybe i'm not doing it the right way.

other than that yes, my original file that i uploaded the other day was a trimmed down version because the site wouldn't let me upload anything larger than 128kb. i had to take out some views.

I will try your next suggestion of adding the text manually since I can't seem to get it to automatically fill it in. I may choose one of my larger forms since that's the one that usually slows it down. I took off the data connection you mentioned so it won't slow things up. :)