XSL matching strings trouble

Question

Hi all, I've been having the issue from here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3840502/sharepoint-issue-selective-behavior

and I think I've narrowed the problem down to this XSL code:

<xsl:if test="contains(translate(string(@Author),
                                 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ',
                                 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'),
                       translate(substring-after($AuthUser,'\'),
                                 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ',
                                 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'))">

In summary, the problem is that some employees that enter information on the list are not able to see it for modification. That piece of code I believe is the part where the application decides to show the information or not. @Author is the person who created the row on the list (I believe its saved in format Firstname SecondName FirstLastName SecondLastName), while $AuthUser should be something like DOMAIN\FirstName LastName.

I'm trying to figure the problem out but I can't tell exactly what that condition checks for. Can anyone explain it to me?

Thanks, EtonB.

Answer 1

It's doing a case-insensitive "contains this string" comparison (the translate() forces to lower case) between the bit after the slash in $AuthUser, and @Author. So, if, e.g., $Author is "MIKE SMITH" and $AuthUser is "MyDomain\Mike Smith", it'll match.

Because it's using contains() rather than doing an exact match, it'll also match, I think, if @Author is, e.g. "Una Jones" and $AuthUser is "A Jones", though, which seems a bit dangerous.