Page: http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=XSPAction , version: 10 on Tue Apr 22 12:34:04 2003 by 81.50.25.248
Page: http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=WoodyIntro , version: 1 on Tue Apr 22 12:57:44 2003 by BrunoDumon New page created: + !!!Woody: a Cocoon Form Framework + + Woody is a form framework for Cocoon. At the time of this writing, it is still + in its rather early stages of development, but we're making quick progress. + + Cocoon already provides a number of form-handling solutions (XMLForm, FormValidatorAction and SimpleFormTransformer, Precept) so you may wonder what makes Woody different. + + Woody combines the easy of use of the FormValidatorAction and the power of XMLForm [[or at least that's its goal, Woody is still in its early days]. You'll be able to create many forms without writing one line of code. You don't even have to be a programmer to be able to create forms with Woody. But if you have additional needs, the hooks are there to extend it. + + Woody takes a widget-oriented approach to forms. A form is defined by specifying the widgets that should appear on the form. Woody contains a set of standard widgets that should cover most needs, but it is possible to add your own ones. Each widget knows how to read its state from a Request object, how to validate itself, and can generate an XML representation of itself. A widget can remember its state itself, so unlike XMLForm or Struts, you do not have to write a form bean for that purpose. A widget can hold strongly typed data. For example, you can indicate that a field should contain a date. If you do this, you can be assured that after the form is successfully validated, and you retrieve its value, you will get a Date object. So your own business logic doesn't need to care about converting strings to other types (and all the locale and formatting related issues of this). + + The basic thing that Woody provides is a Form object. This Form object could be seen as the server-side representation of a client-side form. The Form contains a number of widgets (and is in fact itself also a widget). When a form is submitted, you can call Form.processRequest(Request) to let it (and recursively all the widgets contained in it) read its state from the request. + + The Form object is something that is used by other code, such as an Action or a flowscript, to help in handling forms. Thus Woody will not take complete control of how requests are handled. Woody contains some default Actions to instantiate and process a form. + + As for the presentation of the form (i.e. creating the actual HTML form), Woody provides a WoodyTemplateTransformer. This avoids the need to spend braincycles on designing XSLT's to handle Woody's XML output formats if you just want to create a quick form. [[More details elsewhere] + Page: http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=Woody , version: 1 on Tue Apr 22 12:50:55 2003 by BrunoDumon New page created: + !!!Woody: a form framework for Cocoon + + Woody can be found in the Cocoon 2.1 CVS repository where it resides in its own block. The Woody samples are part of the "Block Samples", or go directly to http://localhost:8888/samples/woody/ to view them. + + * [WoodyIntro] + * [WoodySample] + * [WoodyReference] + * [WoodyNotes] + * [WoodyTODO] + Page: http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=BrunoDumon , version: 3 on Tue Apr 22 12:44:11 2003 by BrunoDumon + * [Woody]
