Hi Sylvain!
Sylvain Wallez wrote:
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I solved points 3&4 as follows :
- <wd:action> are considered as "intra-form" actions : they never validate and always redisplay the form
- <wd:submit> (new widget that extends action) are considered as "form-exit" actions. They have an additional "validate" attribute that define if form validation should occur (true by default). For example, this allows a "cancel" button to be written as <wd:submit id="cancel" validate="false"/>
Would it be possible (perhaps in the future) to handle those intra-form actions completely on the client (eg. via JavaScript)?
Imagine using some DHTML to add or delete rows...
Not that I'd need it right now, but I'm just curious, if you thought about something like that.
Yes, I thought about that, and I even wrote some add/remove stuff for XMLForm before switching to Woody. But this can be very tricky to do as it highly depends on how the form widgets map to HTML code.
And since this mapping is defined by the form template, you can't rely on the fact that a repeater is laid out in a particular way. This could be done, however, if the layout of a repeater was templated using a new instance-only widget like the wi:group defined in "woody-page-styling.xsl".
Now the repeaters are only a small part of event-handling, as actions can be used to do many other things such as getting the (parsed and validated) value of other fields, accessing application data, etc. This server-side event handling allow to simply define complex form interactions at the cost of a roundtrip to the server. I'm currenlty investingating in moving form styling on XSL-enabled clients (Mozilla and IE6) which would speed up this rountripping.
Now handlers involving widgets only (and not app-data) may be sent to the client, but this would require to reconsitute an equivalent of the form model on the client. Not easy, but I'm not a client-side JS expert... Want to give it a try ?
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects } Orixo, the opensource XML business alliance - http://www.orixo.com
