Re: A sumproduct() function proposed for XForms 1.2

All,

As you know I am no fan of adding new functions, as everybody could  
come up with a function that suits his own needs.

Also, this function is trivially (and arguably even more clearly)  
expressed in XPath 2.0 without the need for supplementary functions:

   <output value="sum(for $item in item return $item/quantity * $item/ 
price)">

My opinion is that we should rather concentrate on accelerating XPath  
2.0 adoption in XForms.

-Erik

On Dec 12, 2007, at 12:22 PM, John Boyer wrote:

>
> Hello all,
>
> One of the small features I proposed for XForms 1.2 is a function  
> called sumproduct() which takes the sum of the pairwise products of  
> two nodesets.
>
> Nick responded that this function seemed a little odd because it was  
> essentially calculating two results.  However, it is really only  
> calculating and returning one result.  Moreover, that result can be  
> determined using a single pass through the two nodesets provided.
>
> A quick web search for "sumproduct" will indeed show that this is a  
> *standard* spreadsheet function.  The main point is that on  
> spreadsheets, they actually allow more than two arrays.  The  
> function accumulates the sum of the products of the corresponding  
> elements in each of the arrays provided.
>
> I believe it is likely that this function will be needed for our no- 
> model XForms development, and I am certain it is useful in forms  
> today.  Here is an example:
>
> <group ref="/purchaseOrder/items">
>   <repeat nodeset="item">
>     <input ref="productName"> ...
>     <input ref="quantity">...
>     <input ref="price">...
>     <output value="price * quantity">
>        <label>Product Value</label>
>     </output>
>   </repeat>
>
>   <output value="sumproduct(item/quantity, item/price)">
>       <label>Subtotal</label>
>   </output>
> </group>
>
> You can see here that instance data was not needed for the row  
> products in order to calculate the subtotal over the whole table.
>
> This is good because we don't want limitations of XForms to force  
> people to write their data schemas differently.  A key message we  
> have for XForms is that we provide interactivity and fill  
> experiences for instances of schema defined by the data architect.
>
> For no-model XForms development, I think that the output control may  
> not result necessarily in a data node in the implicit instance.  In  
> this case, there would not be a row product value to refer to, which  
> is analogous to the situation I created above by using a value  
> attribute on the output in the repeat.
>
> Now that there has been some discussion on this, it makes sense to  
> make a thread for it to
> A) find out if there are any other objections to adding this function
> B) to see if I've managed to convince Nick yet :-)
>
> Cheers,
> John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
> Senior Technical Staff Member
> Lotus Forms Architect and Researcher
> Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
> Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
> IBM Victoria Software Lab
> E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com
>
> Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer
> Blog RSS feed: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/rss/JohnBoyer?flavor=rssdw
>

--
Orbeon Forms - Web Forms for the Enterprise Done the Right Way
http://www.orbeon.com/

Received on Wednesday, 12 December 2007 21:34:05 UTC