Documentation Template: conditional including

[M Maher]

Hi,

Can anyone advise if its possible to have conditional (if/else) including of Fields based on whether they're empty?

In my specific example, I would like to do:

if {Connector.Name} is not empty:
   connector > {Connector.Name} < connector
else
   source > {Element.Name} < source

Any ideas?

Mat

[Marc Lampron]

I was looking for the same feature.
In generating a report, the conditional inclusion or exclusion of an element/diagram based on some generating time condition (isDefined, isEmpty, = value, …) could be very useful combined with the possibility (by example) to replace an undefined element with a specific text stating that the element is missing or undefined. That could be very valuable to facilitate the verification of model completeness and other means.

[Pawel Zubkiewicz]

I'm also interested in such solution.

Has anyone manged to include template fragment conditionally? Or "implement" if statement inside the template?

[Eve]

There is no if/else. The closest is the capability to remove a section of text if a field is empty. You should be able to find that information in the help.

[skiwi]

The closest is the capability to remove a section of text if a field is empty.

and this tends to leave extra newlines (whitespace) in the document

[Eve]

and this tends to leave extra newlines (whitespace) in the document

Not if you put the closing bookmark on the next line.

[skiwi]

Not if you put the closing bookmark on the next line.

Yes, you did suggest this to me previously, thanks.
I tried to do this without success, and apart from looking like a kludge that should be fixed in the document generator, it didn't work for me,
could you please point me to an illustrated instruction in the user manual?

[Eve]

I don't know what examples are in the help. I know that the default templates use the technique extensively.

I don't think it's a kludge. It's removing any characters between the two bookmarks. If the end bookmark is on the same line as the first that means it keeps the end of line/paragraph character, resulting in a blank line. It does get a bit tricky when consecutive paragraphs with different styles are being removed. The issue there is that the paragraph style is set on that newline character. The result can be unintuitive, even though it's unavoidable.