The entry screen does NOT list an entry for a merge field when the only place it appears in the document is in a formula. For example this is the only instance of the field DesignControls in the document:

<<If(DesignControls=”Y”)>> text here.<<End()>>

My work around is to place <<DesignControls>> elswhere in the document and then the if statement performs as expected.

My suggestion is to expand the scope of the merge field search to include merge fields that appear only in formulas.

Hello Ed

Thanks for this.

There is a debate about how to handle this situation. At the moment, it is "by design" that data elements in conditions are not automatically included in the interview. This is because in general, not all data elements are entered in the interview - as some may arrive via one of the <<Include...>> commands. On the other hand, in your case it would have been nice if the DesignControls data element was added to the interview screen automatically.

Your idea of adding the merge field <<DesignControls>> into the template achieves that purpose (i.e. getting it into the interview screen), but has the probably unwanted side effect of having the value of the data element being inserted into the merged document at that point.

You can get a data element included in the interview but not in the merged document using the <<CaptureDataElement(DesignControls)>> command.

Or, you could solve all of the issues, and also give the user a nice way of entering the value, by using some thing like <<ChooseUsingCheckBox(DesignControls,Y,N,N)>>.

Please let us know if this works for you.

True enough, after getting some experience I naturally gravitate to using capture function to set the order in wihich users input data.
It was just confusing until I understood.

If a goal is for new xpressdox clients to have an good first experience with conditional statements you'd have to go with an automatic approach.

Otherwise, a mention in the doumentation on the if statement would be helpful.

You're right, Ed, at least a discussion in the help on the If command is called for. I will do that ASAP.

This is actualy a feature request because the program is behaving as designed.
Another thought as to why you want the system to prompt for fields in if statements: Finding errors in merge field names in large documents. If a field in an formula is misspelled I can not find it easily whereas a merge field misspelled is highlighted as an imput prompt.