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The Properties dialog box of a Repeating Group element provides two tabs where you can specify additional search constraints: Advanced and Advanced for All Instances. On the Advanced tab, you can specify additional search constraints for individual instances of the group. On the Advanced for All Instances tab, you can specify additional search constraints for all the instances of the group.

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Advanced and Advanced for All Instances tabs

To open the Properties dialog box, in the FlexiLayout window, right-click the Repeating Group element and select Properties… on the shortcut menu.
Screenshot of the Advanced for All Instances tab of a Repeating Group element's Properties dialog box in ABBYY FlexiLayout Studio.
In the External Fields for All Instances section, you can use all the methods available for a Group element. For example, you can specify relations with already detected instances:
In the Advanced pre-search relations for all instances section, you can use the following methods:
  • MinRepetitions
  • MaxRepetitions
  • PaginalMode
  • MinRepetitionsOnPage
  • MaxRepetitionsOnPage
In the Post-search relations section, you can provide an estimate for a particular instance. In the Post-search relations for all instances section, you can provide an estimate for all the detected instances. In the Pre-search relations section, you can use all the methods available for a Group element. Sample code for the Post-search relations section:
Sample code for the Post-search relations for all instances section:

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Access element instances

Use the following pre-defined names to access element instances: You can access subelements of a Repeating Group element even when they are located lower down in the element tree. You can also use the following methods of the FlexiLayout language to work with element instances:
  • HasInstances – Checks whether any instances have already been found.
  • InstancesCount – Returns the number of detected instances.

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Search stop conditions for element instances

The search for instances stops (in the given branch) if the program encounters an empty hypothesis for a group (that is, a group that has an empty region) or if the program cannot generate any more hypotheses (there are no more hypotheses in the search area). In Paginal mode, this rule applies to the search on one page only. When the program finishes the search on one page, it moves on to the next page. MinRepetitionsOnPage, MaxRepetitionsOnPage, MinRepetitions, and MaxRepetitions also affect the hypothesis generation process. You can use the following methods to change the standard hypothesis generation process: