Question

What I really wewant to do is

  if (exists SomeTopic) {
    print link to topic
  else
    print button using form to create topic from template

Everything up to the else can be doine using

CALC{I$F($EXISTS)...

(see Support.IfTopicExists but I can't get the form to work in the else section: not if it's backslaehd, not if it's all on one line, no way I tried.

Is this a "bug" or a feature or a failure on my part to guess the trick?

Environment

-- VickiBrown - 23 Apr 2007

Answer

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What does the form look like without the calc?

-- PeterThoeny - 24 Apr 2007

The form simply prints a button. If the page does exist, I want to show the link the page; if it doesn't exist, I want to proivide a button that will create it from a template. Showing the link (or not) is working, but so far I haven't found a way to not show the button.

I could INCLUDE the form code from another page, I suppose, but there are a lot of these IFs and buttons, all slightly different, in the set.

The code as I have it now:

%CALC{$IF($EXISTS(%WEB%.%TOPIC%_ReviewForm), [[%TOPIC%_ReviewForm]], Review form %RED%is currently not available%ENDCOLOR%)}%  

<form name="new" action="%SCRIPTURLPATH%/edit%SCRIPTSUFFIX%/%INTURLENCODE{"%WEB%"}%">
     <input type="hidden" name="topic" value="%TOPIC%_ReviewForm" />
     <input type="hidden" value="form" name="action">
     <input type="hidden" name="templatetopic" value="%WEB%.ReviewFormTemplate" />
     <input type="hidden" name="topicparent" value=%TOPIC%" />
     <input type="hidden" name="onlynewtopic" value="on" />
     <input type="submit" value=" Create New Page" /\>
</form>

-- VickiBrown - 24 Apr 2007

If you INCLUDE the topic with the create button you can do that in the "else" part of the $IF() by escaping the INCLUDE: $NOP(%)INCLUDE{...}$NOP(%) is one way of doing it. In the included topic, make sure to use %BASEWEB% and %BASETOPIC% instead of %WEB% and %TOPIC%, repectively.

-- PeterThoeny - 24 Apr 2007

Thanks Peter; this works well (and is actually cleaner and more flexible than trying to shove the form code into the IF statement)

-- VickiBrown - 27 Apr 2007