On Wednesday 12 February 2003 11:43 am, Robin Berjon wrote: > Kip Hampton wrote: > > Robin Berjon wrote: > >> Another would be the ability to populate a > >> form using an instance XML document and the possibility of recreating > >> a similar instance based on what is submitted back. > > > > XForms support aside for a sec, I've been pondering the idea of a > > roundtripping Provider for multi-screen apps. > > > > Ideas? Thoughts? Rotten tomatoes? > > That would be very cool and is a much better description of it than what I > said. Intermediate instances could also be saved so that it would be > trivial for a user to go back and forth in a multi-step application.
Yeah, I built one of these facilities once in the bad old days before XML existed at all. It shouldn't be too tough. What you need is the instance itself, a binding that describes how instance data relates to form fields and what the proper types are etc. a validator to decide if the user input good data, and thats mostly it. Seems to me that XForms does most of that. What I would urge is that whatever system it is will let you do simple stuff easily, and will let you source your instance from pretty much anywhere. That being the case I think you don't want to use a provider. The reasoning is that providers provide XML instances, which is the DATA to operate on. The binding sounds like it can be done with XSP or even XSLT (though in the latter case validation is done how, perl callbacks?). -- Tod Harter Giant Electronic Brain --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
