At 06:49 AM 3/4/2006, you wrote:
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1. I have an item irupture with id tag checked on it. As I understand it, that should generate a tag of itemid.irupture. I have a diffrent item, ienrupture that should only appear if the item irupture is taken. As I understand it, that means if I put itemid.irupture in the childvis section, ienrupture should appear if irupture is taken. It's not, so what did I miss in that?
Have you checked your priorities? If the dependent item is attached at an earlier priority than the thing it depends on, the tag won't have been defined yet, so it will always be missing. That will yield the behavior you are seeing.
Checked priorites how? This is a list; populated by a wildcard on the option. There is nowhere on an item that checks for priority that I can find, or that I can locate in the docs anywhere it talks about items. Items appear in options as child links, there is no way to set the priority there either that I can find on either the option page or anything in the docs. So....what are you talking about?
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That means that it definitely COULD be an issue of priorities. :-)
Given your statement above that implies you're not familiar with priority issues, you MUST read the topic entitled "Evaluation Sequence" within the "Critical Concepts" chapter. Do this BEFORE doing anything else, as it's one of the most important topics in the documentation when writing complex data files.
After you've read the above topic, then please read the topic entitled "Adding Units Dynamically Via Options" within the "How To" chapter. It's immediately above the topic "User-Selection of Items Via Lists".
After you've done those things, review the debugging aids provided within AB. One of them will show you all the links for a unit in the roster, including the priorities and other key bits of info. This will prove invaluable when trying to debug what's actually going on within your data files, since you get all the timing information you need.
When you use list-based selection, items that are chosen by the user are automatically assigned a priority that is one later than the selection option itself. That way, they appear immediately below the selection option in the Options Panel. However, this means that items added are evaluated AFTER the selection option, so their effects cannot be relied upon within the selection option. In this specific case, where you are using the ChildVis tag expression, I think you should be safe from this, but I'm not 100% sure. In any case, it's a critical detail to be aware of.
Another possibility is that the "ienrupture" item has to satisfy BOTH the ChildVis tagexpr AND the Candidate tagexpr. If it's only satisfying one of them, it won't be shown. If you remove the ChildVis tagexpr, does the item show up in the list? If not, then the ChildVis is NOT the source of the problem.
Hope this helps,
Rob