On Wed, 2003-04-02 at 05:32, ivelin wrote: > Bruno, > > It is funny enough that it's April 1, but your email reminds me about the > one Torsten sent out about a year ago, not on April 1 ;) > http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg14370.html >
Maybe in spirit, but not in concrete ideas (see further on...) > > > It should be possible to create a form just by describing its structure > > in an XML file (lets call this a "form description"). I don't like the > > fact that for XMLForm/Struts the user needs to write a bean just to hold > > the form data. Apparently the struts people are realizing this and have > > introduced something like 'DynaFormBeans' for this purpose. XMLForm > > allows to use any DOM document as data-structure, but a DOM document can > > only hold strings, and not dates or numbers. > > Since XMLForm uses JXPath, it also supports DynaBeans > http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg07487.html > > If I am not completely mistaken, most of your email describes in detail > features of an XForms inplementation: cross field dependencies, event > handling, generating instances from XSD. I think that Chiba is probably > (again) your best bet in this regard. > It has a tool which generates XForms documents and instances from XML > Schemas. I think this is where my approach differs from most of the other form solutions discussed here: I'm not interested in being able to edit any XML instance governed by any WXS or RNG schema. I see a form as a collection of widgets holding strongly typed data (strings, numbers, dates, and so on). There will be one special type of widget that is a collection of a set of other widgets. So a form can become a tree structure of widgets, each widget containing some data. Such a form _could_ be populated with data from an XML document, and once the form is succesfully submitted, its data could be applied back to the XML document. But it could be used for any other purpose as well. So in a certain sense, you could see the widget-tree as some kind of limitted, strongly-typed XML tree, and the form description could be seen as a special kind of XML schema. But I don't see any need to actually use XML datastructures and validation here. -- Bruno Dumon http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
