HTML pop-up in ArcGIS 10.1 by using HTML code within a column

Question

I have a layer in ArcGIS 10.1 having a column in the attribute table filled in with HTML code (<p class=MsoNormal> A number of similar..), I was wondering whether it is possible to display a pop-up message based on that HTML code.

For example, by using the HTML Pop-up tool it is the closest I've been, but how do I tell ArcGIS that a specific column should be read as HTML code and not as simple text?.

Answer 1

I ran into this when I converted KML files. All the attributes showed up in an HTMlpopup field. I kept the shapefile and parsed the KML in python to make a CSV file, then I brought that in as a table and joined it to my shapefile. I thought it was odd to find that field. I was also questioning it as my shapefile had a lot of formatting fields but no real usable attributes beyond that field.

Answer 2

I found the solution:

Layer -> Layer Properties -> HTML Popup -> and within the XLS template option (you can simply load the default ESRI one), include the following lines (i.e. after the line 110 in the default template):

<xsl:when MyColumn="FieldValue[starts-with(., '&lt;p ')]">
<xsl:value-of select="FieldValue" disable-output-escaping="yes" />
</xsl:when>

Basically you are indicating that everything that starts with a <p tag, should be filtered and/or escaped as HTML code. Do not forget of replacing 'Mycolumn' in the expression above with the name of your column/field!