[Framers] Are there limits on Conditional Expressions? If so, what are they?

[Lin Sims]

No one wants to tackle that wall o' text, huh? :)

How's this, then. Could someone explain why these two expressions don't
have the same effect, even though (to my eyes) they are logically identical?

This one works:

not ( "DocIss" or "Internal" or "LP" or "LPvA" or "LPvB" or "LPvC" or "NoSeeEm"
or "SAS4" or "SAS4vA" or "SAS4vB" or "SAS4vC" or "TBP" or "WriterNote" ) or (
"LITEvA" and "LP" ) and not ( "Internal" or "TBP" ) or ( "LITEvA" and
"LPvA" ) and not ( "Internal" or "TBP" ) or ( "LITEvA" and "LPvB" ) and not (
"Internal" or "TBP" ) or ( "LITEvA" and "LPvC" ) and not ( "Internal" or "TBP"
) or ( "LITEvA" and "SAS4" ) and not ( "Internal" or "TBP" ) or ( "LITEvA"
and "SAS4vA" ) and not ( "Internal" or "TBP" ) or ( "LITEvA" and "SAS4vB" ) and
not ( "Internal" or "TBP" ) or ( "LITEvA" and "SAS4vC" ) and not (
"Internal" or "TBP" )

This one doesn't:

not ( "DocIss" or "Internal" or "LP" or "LPvA" or "LPvB" or "LPvC" or "NoSeeEm"
or "SAS4" or "SAS4vA" or "SAS4vB" or "SAS4vC" or "TBP" or "WriterNote" ) or (
"LITEvA" and (( "LP" or "LPvA" or "LPvB" or "LPvC" or "SAS4" or
"SAS4vA" or "SAS4vB"
or "SAS4vC" ) and not ( "TBP" or "Internal" ) ) )

Specifically, I have some text marked with LP + LITEvA + TBP, LPvA + LITEvA
+ TBP, and SAS4 + LITEvA + TBP that is hidden if I use the first expression
(which is what I want) and showing if I use the second (which is NOT what I
want).

I'll use the first one (as it works correctly), but it is hard to build,
hard to read, and I'm still not sure if I have it built to address all
possible situations (although it works for the ones I've identified). But
I'd still like to understand why the second one doesn't work. Is this a
quirk of how FrameMaker interprets conditional expressions?

And I'd also still like to know if there's a limit to how long an
expression can be. Since I have to add at least 2 new ones now, the
question is becoming important.

On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 3:35 PM, Lin Sims <ljsims.ml at gmail.com> wrote:

> Does Frame have a limit on how long the expression can be? I know from
> annoying experience that it has a limit on how many nested levels you can
> have. Are there any other gotchas that I should be aware of?
>
> -+ -+ -+ -+ -+ -+ -+ -+ -+ -+ -+ -+ -+ -+
>
> The rest of this email is background info to give y'all an idea of what
> I'm dealing with. Feel free to skip it unless you would like to provide
> some sympathy or are maybe a conditional expression guru and can offer some
> advice.
>
> I've currently got 14 different condition tags in a book, of which 3 are
> never seen publicly and are easy to deal with in the expression, 1 is used
> to indicate information that is under review for inclusion, and the other
> 10 overlap in various weird ways and took me, no lie, a week of
> experimentation to write 8 separate condition expressions to correctly
> generate the 8 different books being output from this set of files. (NB:
> There are 2 IPs. One currently has 3 versions, the other only has 1 but
> will likely have more soon, so I've already created tags to account for
> them.)
>
> They now want me to add another condition, which will actually wind up
> being as more than that since this is another IP with an unknown number of
> versions. (Hell, it's entirely possible the other two IPs will wind up with
> more versions than I've created tags for already, too.)
>
> I think I've worked out the how of adding the various "or" and "and not"
> expressions in, but I'm worried about any limits to Frame's capabilities
> here. Currently, my two longest expressions are 270 characters long, and
> I've managed so far to keep the parenthetical expressions to only 2 levels.
>
> Below is one of the long expressions I'm talking about. If anyone has
> suggestions for making it more elegant, that'd be nice, too. (DocIss,
> NoSeeEm, and WriterNote are the ones never seen by anyone other than the
> developers and internal reviewers. TBP is the one for information under
> review, and is sometimes combined with one or more of the other conditions
> depending on which book the information is slated for. This thing is a
> BEAST.)
>
> not ( "DocIss" or "Internal" or "LP" or "LPvA" or "LPvB" or "LPvC" or "NoSeeEm"
> or "SAS4vB" or "SAS4vC" or "TBP" or "WriterNote" ) or ( "SAS4" and (
> "LPvB" or "LPvC" ) ) and not ("TBP" or "Internal") or ( "SAS4vA" and (
> "LPvB" or "LPvC" ) ) and not ("TBP" or "Internal")
>
> Regards,
>
> Lin Sims
>



-- 
Lin Sims