Mass Entity Rule Possible?

[step]

Originally Posted by lance

Isn't this just re-adding (overwriting) and re-defining the variable each iteration through the for loop?

Yes. But, in doing so it updates the value returned by the "Field" function. Let's assume you have a field in your data called "Salutation" and that field contains "Dear Lance." Naturally, that is too formal and you'd instead like to be addressed as "The Lance-meister":

var salutation = ReplaceSubstring(
  Field("Salutation"), // Field("Salutation") will return "Dear Lance"
  "Lance",             // This is the value to be replaced
  "The Lance-meister"  // This is the new value
);

// This line will update the value returned by the "Field" function
// for the "Salutation" field.
FusionPro.Composition.AddVariable("Salutation", salutation);

// On second thought, "The Lance-meister" sounds a little too 1985.
// Let's update that to "The Lance-inator"
FusionPro.Composition.AddVariable("Salutation", ReplaceSubstring(
  Field("Salutation"), // Field("Salutation") returns "Dear The Lance-meister"
  "-meister",          // This is the value to be replaced
  "-inator"            // This is the new value
));

// "Dear?" That's no way to address The Lance-inator. Let's fix that.
FusionPro.Composition.AddVariable("Salutation", ReplaceSubstring(
  Field("Salutation"), // Field("Salutation") returns "Dear The Lance-inator"
  "Dear",              // This is the value to be replaced
  "Sup"                // This is the new value
));

Obviously, you wouldn't really write the code like that but I just wanted to illustrate what the for loop is doing in the original code. The above example could be re-written like so:

var charMap = {
// Find       : Replace
   "Lance"    : "The Lance-meister",
   "-meister" : "-inator",
   "Dear"     : "Sup",
}

for (var field in FusionPro.Fields) {
  for (var find in charMap) {
    var replace = charMap[find];
    FusionPro.Composition.AddVariable(field,
      ReplaceSubstring(Field(field), find, replace), true);
  }
}

That being said, if you're skeptical of overwriting the field value with AddVariable, you could assign the values to a variable and only update the field value one time once all of the necessary replacements have been made:

// An object of values to find as the keys,
// and the string to replace them with as the value.
var charMap = {
// Find      : Replace
   "’":"’",
   "’":"'",
   "¼":"¼",
   "½":"½",
   "¾":"¾",
   "—":"–",
   "—":"—",
}

// Loop through all of the fields.
for (var field in FusionPro.Fields) {
  var fieldVal = Field(field);
  // Loop through all of the find/replace values for current field.
  for (var find in charMap) {
    var replace = charMap[find];
    fieldVal = ReplaceSubstring(fieldVal, find, replace);
  }
  // Update the field's value
  FusionPro.Composition.AddVariable(field, fieldVal, true);
}