Freemarker Dynamically reference tag outside my fo:table-body

Question

I can't show you the whole code, but the following are basically the steps I'm taking to generate dynamic code inside my fo-table-body tag.

At a stage inside <fo:table-body>, I want to be able to reference the block named "ref" and change the value inside out if. Is this possible ?

<#assign value="Hello World"/>
<fo:block name"ref">
      <fo:inline font-weight="bold">Value: </fo:inline>
      <fo:inline>${Value}</fo:inline>
    </fo:block>
    <fo:table-body start-indent="0pt">
    // All sorts of data inside the tags 
         <fo:table-row>
            <fo:table-cell></fo:table-cell>
         </fo:table-row> 
   </fo:table-body>

Answer 1

FreeMarker templates continuously write to the output as they are executed, so if you have already printed a piece of output, then it's not in the hands of FreeMarker anymore. (It might be still sitting in some buffer behind the Writer, but FreeMarker is not aware of that.) What you can do though is generating the dependency part (fo:table-body) first, but capturing it instead of printing it, like <#assign tableBody><fo:table-body...>...</fo:table-body></#assign>, then generate the dependent part (fo:block) as usual, then print the captured part (${tableBody}, or <#noescape>${tableBody}</#noescape>, depending on what kind of auto-escaping you use).