Special Characters in Drop-Down Lists
The validated data that you find in the drop-down lists must be entered in the
APPSETTINGS.XML file. However, certain character strings cannot be contained in
an XML file. XML files define five entity references for special
characters. In order to use these characters in the drop-down lists, you must
substitute them with the entity reference codes. Otherwise the character
will be interpreted as part of the XML file. The five entity references
are as follows:
| Ampersand - & |
& |
| Greater than - > |
> |
| Less than - < |
< |
| Quotation mark - " |
" |
| Apostrophe - ' |
' |
The most common time we have found this is when people want to put the ampersand
(&) character in the Company or Department name attributes. Here is an
example of the text that must be in the department's value tags:
<company
label="Company" editable="yes" visible="yes">
<value>Somorita
Surfboards</value>
<value>Somorita Water Sports Design & Research
Organization</value>
<value>Bob's Boogie Boards & Smoothie
Stand</value>
</company>
Note the above XML tag is from v1.1 of the Directory Update software. For
v1.0 of the software, the XML tags and optoins are slightly different:
<company
label="Company" editable="true">
<value>Somorita
Surfboards</value>
<value>Somorita Water Sports Design & Research
Organization</value>
<value>Volcano Surfboards</value>
<value>Bob's
Boogie Boards & Smoothie Stand</value>
</company>
