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:

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 &amp; Research Organization</value>
  <value>Bob's Boogie Boards &amp; 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 &amp; Research Organization</value>
  <value>Volcano Surfboards</value>
  <value>Bob's Boogie Boards &amp; Smoothie Stand</value>
</company>