roundtripping forms based on schemas

[S Woodside]

Hi there axkitters.

I'm working on a system to use a Relax NG (RNG) schema to generate HTML forms. The user will interact with the forms, and when they press submit, XML will be generated from the form results. The XML can be validated against the form either by javascript on the UA or by the server after it gets it back

So... it seems that there's a company or two that's done this, but it's all commercial stuff without much documentation. Once I settled on RNG as my schema language, I converted the DTD I am using (Resume XML from sourceforge) into RNG using dtdinst tool. Now I am writing an XSLT to convert the RNG to HTML forms. The idea is to make it generic so that I can change the forms by changing the RNG. I don't like working with HTML forms directly, they are too messy.

Now, I can generate a huge mega form but that's not really practical, it ends up as a 250K + HTML file that renders really slowly. As well, there are <zeroOrMore> and <oneOrMore> tags in RNG to specify dynamic sections of content. For the size reason, and because I don't know javascript and DOM yet, I'm leaning towards a roundtripping server solution. Also it will work on more browsers, AFAIK browser support for DOM manipulation is spotty.

My idea is that when I hit a <zeroOrMore> tag with a FooBar child, I'll prune the (RNG) tree at that point and provide a button that says something like ((Add a FooBar element)). The button will pass back information that identifies the pruned subtree uniquely to the server. The server will then feed that subtree back into the RNG->HTML Form XSLT and so on and so forth. I want to write as little application (i.e., Resume XML) code as possible.

So how do I best handle the POST/GET parameters? I want to be able to grab the params from the POST/GET whatever and feed the unique ID back into the RNG-HTMLForms XSLT to generate the appropriate new section.

Also, I need to have some way to assemble the pieces of XML that are created this way into a complete instance document. It should be easy to name the HTML forms fields in such a way that I can generate XML from them. I think there's already some code out there that automatically generates XML from the form fields (Matt was that yours?) I will probably need to assemble multiple pieces into the complete instance document.

Please advise!

Simon

---
www.simonwoodside.com


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]