In an XForms form, I have a section that repeats with inputs inside of it. There is a dropdown that will populate in each repeated section and no two dropdowns can have the same value selected. Each dropdown must have a unique selection and if there is a duplicate selection between dropdowns in the seperate sections they should become invalid.
This is the idea I am going for
constraint="not(. = instance('my-instance')/repeated-section[Include everything BUT .'s parent]/dropdown)"
Sample Instance Data:
<repeated-section>
<input1></input1>
<input2></input2>
<dropdown></dropdown>
<input4></input4>
</repeated-section>
<repeated-section>
<input1></input1>
<input2></input2>
<dropdown></dropdown>
<input4></input4>
</repeated-section>
<repeated-section>
<input1></input1>
<input2></input2>
<dropdown></dropdown>
<input4></input4>
</repeated-section>
This is mainly an XPath filtering question. Is it possible to do what I am asking? I want to compare the current node (lets say the 2nd set of the repeated-section) against all other repeated nodesets (repeated-section 1 and 3), excluding the current nodeset (because if you compare against all including the self, it will of course be compared to as true).
To simplify things, I assumed that you have just one element for each iteration of the repeat:
<instance>
<repeated-value>1</repeated-value>
<repeated-value>2</repeated-value>
<repeated-value>2</repeated-value>
</instance>
Then the constraint becomes:
<xforms:bind ref="repeated-value" constraint="not(. = (../repeated-value except .))"/>
One trick is in the except
keyword, which allows you to build a sequence with all the "other repeat-value". Then you want to know if any of those is equal to the current node, which you do with =
operator. Finally, the node is valid, if you can't find another node with the same value, hence the not()
. Note that using not(… = …)
is not the same as … != …
. And here is a full example to try this out:
<xhtml:html xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:xforms="http://www.w3.org/2002/xforms"
xmlns:xxforms="http://orbeon.org/oxf/xml/xforms"
xmlns:ev="http://www.w3.org/2001/xml-events"
xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:fr="http://orbeon.org/oxf/xml/form-runner">
<xhtml:head>
<xhtml:title>No more than one</xhtml:title>
<xforms:model>
<xforms:instance>
<instance>
<repeated-value>1</repeated-value>
<repeated-value>2</repeated-value>
<repeated-value>2</repeated-value>
</instance>
</xforms:instance>
<xforms:bind ref="repeated-value" constraint="not(. = (../repeated-value except .))"/>
</xforms:model>
<xhtml:style type="text/css">
.xforms-repeat-selected-item-1 { background: transparent }
.xforms-input { display: block; padding-bottom: .5em }
</xhtml:style>
</xhtml:head>
<xhtml:body>
<xforms:repeat ref="repeated-value">
<xforms:input ref=".">
<xforms:alert>This value is repeated more than once</xforms:alert>
</xforms:input>
</xforms:repeat>
</xhtml:body>
</xhtml:html>