The Group by content function supplements filtering, sorting and grouping of table contents. It allows you to quickly define a condition if contents should be displayed e.g. together or not at all.
Again we have prepared a simple example to demonstrate how grouping by content can be used. We created a simple table and filled it with some data:
The XML file is also very simply structured, and it contains 20 products:
The respective PDF output now would look like this:
You can see the data for the products; name, description, material and color. You can also see that the products are currently sorted by their name. With the Group by content function you can now influence the display of these data sets.
Open the Grouping dialog for the table and switch to the tab Group by content:
In the right frame you can see all nodes contained in the node Product, where we grouped the entire table to. Every node listed here offers a selection of expressions. To view these, click the [] symbol in the column Expression, e.g. for Color, to select this node, and then click the double arrow symbol to open the expression overview:
The function Auto has the effect that you only have those data sets displayed which actually possess a value for this attribute, in this case a value for color:
The current sorting type is neither ascending nor descending but both are certainly possible.
Select Sort order: ascending:
The result:
The Sort order: descending has this effect:
You can also specify that e.g. you need to display only green products:
The result:
If you only want to display those green products made of wood, add one more attribute to your Group by content rule:
The result:
The Group by content function is very convenient to filter and sort data to achieve the display you need. All attributes can be combined, even attributes, which are not actually used in the table, can be used to group and sort the data.
In case that you cannot achieve the result you need with the options offered in the dialog, you could also enter XPath expressions into the entry field.
After you made all entries, apply them with the button "OK" or abort with the button "Close".