XPath Selects

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.