Altova MobileTogether Designer

Repeating tables work as follows:

•A repeating element in the page source is associated with the repeating table (see examples below).

•The table can be designed to contain any number of rows and columns.

•For each occurrence of the repeating element, the table that you design will be repeated. So if the table design contains two rows, then a table with two rows will be created for each occurrence of the repeating element.

•The content of the table can be dynamic. XPath expressions inside the table will have the associated repeating element as its context node. For every occurrence of the element, the specific occurrence will be the context node for that specific table (see examples below).

•An Append/Delete control can be added to the table that enables end users to add new rows and delete individual rows. For example, if the user adds a row, a new occurrence of the associated table element will be added to the tree of the page source. These modifications can be saved back to the data source, thus enabling end users to modify the data source.

A repeating table is defined at the time when the Table control is dropped into the design.

Example

A Person element in the page source contains, say, First, Last, and Phone child elements. The Person element can occur multiple times (its instances). We would like to create a table like this:

Since the Person element repeats, we can create a repeating table that is associated with the Person element and specify, in the New Table dialog (see below), that the table has one row and four columns. Inside this table the context node is Person. In each column, we make page source links to the respective child nodes (see screenshot below). The first column contains an XPath expression to number the current Person element, for example: count(preceding-sibling::*)+1. The design would look something like this:

The generated table would look something like this:

Difference between a repeating table and a table with dynamic rows

A repeating table is different than a table with dynamic rows in the following ways:

•In a repeating table, it is the entire table that is associated with the repeating data structure. A new table is generated for each occurrence

•In a table with dynamic rows, a table row group is associated with the repeating structure.

This difference has two design effects:

•A table with dynamic rows can have a header and/or footer that applies to the entire table. It is a header/footer for the table. If a header/footer is required for a repeating table, they can be manually added outside the repeating table. If added inside the repeating table, then these will repeat with each table for each element occurrence.

•Since tables are typically rendered with space above and below them in device displays, repeating tables will contain vertical space between each pair of repeated tables.

To change a static table to a repeating table after the table has been created, change its Repeating property to true, then associate the table with a repeating element from a page source.

Creating a repeating table

Set up a repeating table as follows:

1.In the New Table dialog that appears when the Table control is dropped in the design (screenshot below), check Table will be repeating to make the table repeating. Note that it is the table that repeats for every instance of a repeating data row.

2.Specify the number of static columns and rows that the repeating table will have. You can subsequently add columns and rows to the repeating table via the table's context menu.

3.Specify whether automatic Append/Delete controls are to be added. If added, each repeating table in the solution, effectively a row, will have a Delete button, and the entire repeating table structure will have an Append button to append a repeating table (row) to the structure (see the screenshot of a simulated solution below).

4.On clicking OK in the New Table dialog, the table is added to the design. The repeating table must now be associated with the repeating element from the page source (see screenshot below).

5.Associate a repeating element with the repeating table by dragging and dropping the element from the Page Sources Pane into the table.

6.You can now add content to the cells of the table. The context node for XPath expressions within table cells is the element node that is associated with the repeating table (see previous step). To use the context node, XPath expressions in table cells should be relative to the context node. Cell content can be a nested table (static or dynamic), or a page control (with or without a link to a page source node), or even page source nodes. When a page source node is dropped into a cell, the data in that cell will be editable. In the screenshot below, four controls have been added (from left to right): a label, edit field, label, and edit field.

 
This repeating table produces the following repeating structure in the MobileTogether solution.
 

Table restructuring commands are available in the context menu of the table. Table formatting properties are available in the Styles & Properties Pane. See also Dynamic Rows and Dynamic Columns.