[Bob Campbell]
I'm probably not explaining right, (certainly wouldn't be the first time). She is connecting through an ODBC connection and she can run a select * and pull up all the links for the reports. The links are hardcoded in the db. When, for example, the Zope page is requested it runs the select all query and presents a list with dates and report name.(for 8 banks). That works fine.... The the problem comes in when she has to ask if a link to a file is available (it may or may not be) if it is then put it up, if it isn't, put up the old file.
If the variable is known to exist but might be an empty string, you can test with a <dtml-if>: <dtml-if filevar>...</dtml-if> If the variable might or might not exist, you can look up how to check for the existence of a variable that might be known to a dtml page. If you need to check the file system to see if a named file is actually there, you need to use Python (as others have said) or install the LocalFS product (easy to do). LocalFS knows how to access the file system for you. Cheers, Tom P