Hi all, As some of you know I am interested in XForms and would love to be part of this community effort if and when it starts.
Currently I am co-supervising two thesis students working on a project the uses XForms, Grails, and IBM DB2 similar to this http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xformsruby1/index.html (but Grails instead of Rails). The goal of the project is to have a generic form-based documentation framework for medical data. Obviously in the longterm I have openEHR data in mind. I don't think we will get as far as auto-generating XForms GUIs for openEHR data, but I hope we can hand-code a XForms GUI for the chronic wound use case I have been building several archetypes and one template for. To speed up the XForms hand-coding I plan to use the IBM XForms Generator (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xfg) to scaffold an initial form, which obviously needs to be customised a lot to respresent as many of the archetype and template constraints as possible. After submission of the instance it will be additionally checked against the whole template data schema (TDS) on the server-side. I did a first test of this generator. For more details look on the wiki: http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/dev/IBM+XForms+Generator+Test Cheers, Thilo On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Heath Frankel <heath.frankel at oceaninformatics.com> wrote: > Hi Thilo, > It is interesting you have talked about the idea of scaffolding a GUI. This > is exactly the work Ocean is doing at present. We have redeveloped our Web > Forms engine to work based on this principle. From a template developed > using the Ocean template Designer, we now generate a Form Definition file > based on that template using a basic (and modifiable) presentation > transformation. This assumes nothing about layout and only specifies the > existence of controls within groups and incorporate the AOM constraints for > the corresponding data bound object from the reference model. This gives > forms engine all the information it needs to generate a basic form at > runtime straight from a template. The advantage of having this form > definition over simply creating a form straight from the template/archetype > as demonstrated by Greg is that we can use the same artefact to customise > the layout of the form using an editor. The forms engine can then process > both designed (after initial scaffolding) and auto-generated forms as > required. The Forms Definition format we are currently using is > proprietary, but I would be interested give some time and reason to see how > we can import/export into a standard format such as XForms. However, I am > sceptical about the use of XForms unless we utilise extensions significantly > otherwise we lose way too much information available in the AOM constraints. > > > Heath >
