Hi Lars,
thanks for your answer. In this case, I'll simply leave it as is -
editing in XXE using a simple css stylesheet is definitely much easier
than using Firefox plugin. I thought the editing could be made simply
natively in OOo and that was my goal. Using XForms was supposed to meet
this challenge.
But maybe it's feasible to use ODT with form-editing controls and
stylesheets to edit my XML file? I mean I could add special styles etc.
- roughly the way you can edit DocBook but more in a form-like way.
Would that be overkill? I'm not sure if ODT<->hierarchical XML is a
feasible roundtrip. (Probably not really, just curious if anyone has
implemented anything like that.)
Anyway, it's strange that no database connector in OOo is able to handle
directly XML files as databases (I know, hierarchic files aren't easily
translatable into SQL, but anyway...).
Regards,
Marcin
Lars Oppermann pisze:
Hi Marcin
The dynamic XForms features are not currently available in
OpenOffice.org. This is a limitation of the XForms implementation, that
is caused by the fact that it cannot modify the containing document
dynamically as would be required for such cases as adding items, hiding
items corresponding to certain nodes, etc. You can try to emulate such
dynamic behavior with macros but that would somewhat defeat the reason
one would use XForms in the first place. An XForms+XHTML approach (e.g.
Firefox XForms Plugin, Chiba or Orbeon) might be a better fit for your
requirements.
Cheers,
Lars
Marcin Miłkowski wrote:
Hi,
I'm investigating if using XForms in OOo would be a good solution for
the OpenOffice.org extension that I'm co-developing, LanguageTool
(grammar checker for many languages). We have complex XML files that
specify rules - and we'd like to have an easy UI for average users
that are interested in writing rules for the grammar checker but
aren't able to edit XML files directly.
The question is whether it's possible to implement things like adding
nodes to the document (add another rule, add another element etc.) and
deleting nodes using XML Form controls. Currently, we're using XMLmind
XML Editor css-based method, but as this is not open source, we'd like
to migrate to OOo. Another thing that XMLMind editor has is collapsing
some nodes - that would be quite important for us as rule-specifying
documents are pretty complex and long (several hundreds of rules for
some languages). Something like collapsing or easy browsing the file
is therefore very important.
So my idea was to use XSLT to generate ODF document with XForms. The
user could edit the document and use a button to test the file (using
our extension Java method, after saving to a test location, for
example). Then she would save the file to the original location using
the Save method with the action specifying the URL of the file (the
old file being backed up, of course).
But maybe I should write XSLT to build ODF with some basic input
forms, and then use another XSLT for re-generating the rules (this
could result in many XML problems, like users disobeying some format
constraints, I'm afraid).
Thank you in advance for any advice on that,
Regards,
---
Marcin Miłkowski
Polish NL Lead
PS. http://www.languagetool.org
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