Note that as of Version 3 of XpressDox, the Template Author’s Toolkit has been retired and replaced by the Command Editor.
The left hand tree view
The left hand tree view of the Template Author’s Toolkit has a large collection of commonly used Fillpoints, including formatting functions of various types.
Double-clicking an Example in the left hand tree view will cause an example of the Fillpoint to be inserted into the template, with the data element name (usually) being selected so that it can be replaced with the actual data element name. If there is selected text already in the template when an Example is double-clicked, then the selected text is (usually) used to replace the name of the data element in the example.
Wizards work in a similar fashion, but instead of providing just an example, they will provide a place for all the parameters in the Fillpoint to be completed.
The right hand tree view
The right hand tree view will initially contain a list of commonly used data element names. This list is defined in the template CommonDataElementNames.xdtpl which is installed with XpressDox in the My Documents\XpressDox folder. This demonstrates the feature whereby any XpressDox template can be included into the right hand tree view as a schema, and then the data elements which were defined in that template are then available for insertion into the template currently being authored.
The CommonDataElementNames template can be modified to contain only the data elements that you require. Or, the template can be deleted (or renamed) to prevent it being loaded every time into the Toolkit.
When some data sources have been defined, and schema for them created, the data source schemas can also be included in the right hand tree view to help the template author select correctly named data elements.
Double-clicking a data element will create a Fillpoint containing that item. Or, if there is text selected in the template being authored, then the double-click will result in the selected text being replaced with the data element.
If the Shift key is held down while double-clicking, then the data element name is inserted into the template, that is no Fillpoint is created. If any text is selected when the Shift-Double-Click is performed, that text is replaced by the data element name.
If a data element is dragged from the right hand tree view and dropped onto a Fillpoint in the left hand tree view, then the data element is inserted into the relevant position in the Fillpoint and the result included in the template.
If the Ctrl key is held down during a Double-Click or a Drag-and-Drop, then the fully qualified data element name will be inserted. This applies to data elements that are contained in parent elements in the data (that is, either the parents are repeated elements or when the data source was created it was defined with a Parent Element Name supplied).
A fully qualified data element name would be, for example, ‘Contact/Fullnames’, or ‘InvoiceEntry/Amount’. The unqualified names in these two cases would be, respectively, ‘Fullnames’ and ‘Amount’.
The Toolbar
The toolbar has buttons for the following features:
a. Define the font and colour of the Fillpointtext. This is for legibility. By default the font is Arial and the colour blue. The size of the text inside the fillpoint varies with the size of the surrounding text.
In addition to the fillpoint font and colour, there are five other colours that can be set in this font dialog – these are the colours of the 5 levels of highlighting that the Template Painter (see point b.) applies to block commands.
b. Paint the template: format all fillpoints in the current template with the defined font and colour. This allows the template author to type the fillpoints by hand and then apply the defined font and colour to all of them. The Template Painter will also highlight matching <<If()>>, <<Else()>> and <<End()>> commands, as well as matching <<ForEach()>> and <<End()>> commands. It uses the colours defined in by the font dialog in a. above to achieve this. This highlighting feature helps the template author in working with templates which contain complicated assembly logic.
c. Convert a template from another document assembly system. This feature will enable conversion of Microsoft® Office Word fillpoints to XpressDox format, and also assists in converting templates marked up with codes from other document assembly systems.
d. Add a schema or template to the right-hand tree view, and also remove a schema or template from that tree view.
e. A Help button, which loads this web-site for searching. When the F1 button is pressed, the web-site is loaded and a list of blog entries which apply to the context is presented.
The toolbar also includes a search function, which searches the left-hand tree view for the text typed into the text box on the toolbar. The Ctrl-f key combination is a shortcut to that text box.
