XPath Selects
Overview
Tip: To learn more about XPath, please refer to W3Schools XPath tutorial at http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/default.asp.
Select Modes
A select can be evaluated in one of three ways:
- !select - Where the select is passed to the underlying datasource.
- =evaluate - Where the select is evaluated by the macro evaluator.
- 'value - Where the select is placed as a string of text in the output.
Blueprint AutoTag uses a set of rules to guess as to which of the above modes to use. However, you can explicitly force a specific mode by setting the first character of the select to !, =, or ' (as shown above on each item).
AutoTag will always display the mode it is using on a select in the UI. In the tag builder if you set it to force a mode, it will place the first character only if that is not the guessed mode for that select.
Date Comparisons
XPath does not support inequality tests on dates. Therefore you cannot test /root/node < ${date}. You can do = and != because it treats them as strings. This is true even if you supply a schema and the node is set to xsd:dateTime, xsd:date, or xsd:time.
If you supply a variable such as ${date} that is a Date object, it will be placed in the xsd:date format for a select that is a value and in the xsd:dateTime format if the select is is a select or evaluate.
