Conditional display - dynamic text on data driven page

Zeke

In a grid map in Layout view with data driven pages enabled, I added dynamic text to show the grid number of grid squares adjoining the square that has the focus (i.e., GridNumber_S. GridNumber_E, etc). This works fine until a square is at the end of a row or column, where ther is no adjoing square on that side. Then the text displays '[empty]'.

Short of adding empty spaces to all the empty fields to trick the dynamic text engine, is there a way to only display the text if there's text in the field? A simple If statement would do the job, but I don't see anywhere to do this. Thanks.

dynamic_empty.PNG

DavidBarnes

Seems like answers are getting lost when old posts are getting ported over.

The answer can be found in the help. For example, in this topic:

http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/map/page-layouts/using-dynamic-text-with-data-driven-pages.htm

The brief answer is, when the string is empty, you can tell it to use any user-defined default text (or just make it blank; not sure if it would need a blank space as a sort of place holder or if it can be totally empty) by doing something like this (adjusted for your particular case, of course):

<dyn type="page" property="PageName_NW" emptyStr=""/>