Repeating Paragraph elements can be used to create entire paragraphs to be repeated for a selected element in your data source.  You will find these very useful for creating full paragraphs that will display as much content as you would like, and this information will be displayed for every occurrence of your selected element.  An example of this would be designing a section to display product information for every product in a catalog.

 

In the example in Figure 1, a Repeating Paragraph is used to display information on every specific transaction line in a statement.

 

Figure 1:  A Repeating Paragraph is used to display information for each transaction line in a statement.

Usage

To insert a Repeating Paragraph section into your Document Template, you will first need to select Insert in the Side Menu.  From the resulting Insert Dialog, select Dynamic Section.  Now select Repeating Paragraph to access the Repeating Paragraph Dialog.

 

Figure 2:  The Repeating Paragraph dialog allows easy access to choosing the repeating element.

Selecting Your Repeating Element

You will now need to use the Repeating Paragraph Dialog to select the element in your data source that you would like the paragraph section to repeat for.  To do so, you can simply select the element from the Data Representation Tree, or you can select Create Expression to launch the Edit Expression Dialog to build your own custom expression.

 

When you have successfully configured what element or expression you would like your section to repeat for, select Insert to insert the section in your Document Template.  

Adding Your Content

You will now notice that in the Design Surface your Repeating Paragraph section will be present and highlighted in blue.  There will also be placeholder text present in the Repeating Paragraph section to notify you that you need to customize what is to be displayed for every occurrence of your chosen element.  In the example in Figure 3 you can notice that the selected repeating element is "/statement/transactions/line".  This means that for every occurrence of this element, whatever content that is located within will be displayed.

 

Figure 3: The Repeating Paragraph is highlighted in blue and displays placeholder text.

 

Now you will need to replace the placeholder text with the content you would like to display in your paragraph.  In this example, you will notice that a clear table is used to align content related to each transaction line.  This utilizes the use of Tables to display both static text and Fields. This information will repeat for every occurrence of the selected Line element.

 

Figure 4:  Content is placed inside the Repeating Paragraph.    

 

When you are satisfied with the content in your Repeating Paragraph section, you should use the document view menu in the Status Bar to Preview your results.  This will allow you to test the behavior of this Dynamic Element.  You can see in Figure 1 the results from this example using the Print Preview option.