Month: November 2014

When working with NetSuite’s Advanced PDF/HTML Templating system it’s difficult in being able to find documentation on the syntax structure for working with logic in the templates.

One of the requirements I had was being able to determine whether the quantity ordered on an item has the same quantity ordered as the previous item. This required the ability to determine that the item being iterated through with the #list function was not the first item (otherwise it wouldn’t have been able to compare to the previous item – as there would be none!) and if the item was NOT the second to be able to compare the previous item’s quantity to its current quantity (if it’s then different to do stuff).

Here’s how the template in this respective area then worked:

The important elements to be mindful of when writing this code is:

• Don’t use ${ and/or } within the if statements – these are for placing those data elements directly into the HTML.
• Be wary on using just < or > or <= or >= in your logical expressions, otherwise you’ll receive an error – something to the effect of:

The template cannot be saved due to the following errors: Error on line 133, column 34 in template. Expecting a boolean (true/false) expression here. Expression i.quantity does not evaluate to true/false . it is an instance of com.netledger.templates.model.NumberModel

To get around these problems do any one of the following:

• Wrap your logical expression containing your greater-than or less-than sign in brackets, such as <#if ( i.quantity > record.item[item_index-1].quantity )>...</#if>
• Use the shortcode expressions (gt is >, lt is <, gte is >=, lte is <=), such as <#if i.quantity gt record.item[item_index-1].quantity>...</#if>

In fact if you use any sort of logical operator in your expression it’s probably best practice wrapping it in brackets:

<#if ( ( i.quantity > record.item[item_index-1].quantity ) && ( i.quantity > 1 ) ) >...</#if>

More information on the syntax used in NetSuite’s Advanced PDF/HTML Templating system can be found at the FreeMarker website.

If you’ve been tinkering around with the wonderful Advanced PDF/HTML Template within NetSuite there are times when you’ll receive some ambiguous errors.

I received one today which had me scratching my head for quite some time, it was:

Problem saving template: Index: 2, Size: 2

Whenever you encounter this error it’s trying to tell you there’s an error in your table structure with the number of rows and cells – this will need fixing otherwise it will not save your template.

To try to debug where the error lay go back to your template and click on the Save button again to see if a different prompt occurs – if you’re lucky you’ll be given another ambiguous error, but this time you’re going to try to read this new error to determine where the FreeMarker parser is actually encountering problems.

With this line number go back and copy your parsed code and paste it into your favourite text editor to try to locate the line.

Even though this line will not likely be where the error is it will likely put you in the right area. When you are here you need to begin checking your tr and td tags and any rowspan or colspan calls within those tags.

In my case the second error was pointing me to the footer macro area of which I had the following code which produced the original ambiguous error:

<table>
    <tr>
        <td rowspan="2"></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
    </tr>
</table>

From the above you can see with my first td tag I made it span over 2 rows, however, with the second td tag it didn’t know where to go as I hadn’t created an additional column for it. In the end I amended my code to the following which made it no longer throw an error:

<table>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
        <td></td>
    </tr>
</table>

I just removed the rowspan parameter as I found I didn’t really need it and ended up combining it into one row.