PIA entities are named objects that can be referred to in interforms. They function much like variables in that they can be defined and later replaced by their definition.
XHTML entities follow the same
conventions as XML entities and therefore begins with an ampersand
(&) followed by a name, and ends with a semicolon
(;).
More formally the rules for entity creation might be specified as follows:
Case is significant in entity names.
Thus to reference the current day of the week one might include the following text:
Today
is &day;.This text might be evaluated, assuming that this is the start of a new work week, as:
Today
is Monday.:). These sub-names form
a path (similar to a file path) through a sequence of "namespaces."
If no namespace is given, the interpreter searches through any locally-defined
entities (for example, the list element entity defined by the repeat
tag) and the top-level (global) entity table associated with the
interform being interpreted.Entities can be used as "iteration
variables." For example, you can repeat some text for every item
in a list. The &li; entity is replaced by each
list item in turn.
The document Evaluated Entities shows
the value on your system of each of the entities listed below.
| agentName | Name of the agent that owns this XHTML form |
| agentNames | The names of all defined agents. |
| agentPath | Full path to this agent (i.e. "/Type/Name" if agentName and
agentType are different) |
| agentType | Type of the agent that owns this XHTML form |
| date | Current date in the form yyyymmdd. This format
is an ISO standard; dates in this format can be sorted, and
are valid as filenames, SGML identifiers, table keys, and
so on. |
| dateString | Current date and time in a human-readable form similar to that generated
by the Unix date command. |
| day | Current day of the month, padded with zero if necessary to make two digits. |
| dayName | Name of the current day of the week. |
| entityNames | Names of all defined entities. |
| fileName | Name of the file containing the XHTML form being expanded. |
| filePath | Complete path to the file containing the XHTML form being expanded. This is always a complete pathname on the system running the PIA. |
| forms | Counter that is incremented at the end tag of every form element. Can be used for constructing a unique identifier for each form in a document. |
| hour | Current hour, padded with a zero if necessary to make two digits. |
| minute | Current minute, padded with a zero if necessary to make two digits. |
| month | Current month (starting with January = 1), padded with a zero if necessary to make two digits. |
| monthName | Current month (starting with January = 1), padded with a zero if necessary to make two digits. |
| PIA:home | Full pathname of the directory in which the PIA is installed. |
| PIA:host | Fully-qualified domain name of the host on which the PIA is executing. |
| PIA:port | Number of the port on which the PIA is ostensibly listening for connections. | PIA:realport | Number of the port on which the PIA is really listening for connections. |
| user.name | Login name of the user executing the PIA. |
| second | Current second, padded with a zero if necessary to make two digits. |
| time | Current time in the form hh:mm |
| transAgentName | Name of the agent (if any) to which the current request transaction is directed, or which generated the current response transaction. |
| transAgentType | Type of the agent (if any) to which the current request transaction is directed, or which generated the current response transaction. |
| url | Full URL of the current transaction. |
| urlPath | Path part of the current transaction's URL. |
| urlQuery | Query string of the current transaction's URL. |
| PIA:root | Full pathname of the directory that contains the user's personal PIA state. This is the root of the PIA's URL tree. |
| weekday | Index (Sunday = 0) of the current day of the week. |
| year | Current (four-digit) year. This may be inaccurate if the PIA is executed with the system's date set before 1970. |