FW: question on reusable XForms UI components

Here are some comments on XForms. Does anyone have anything to add to the
discussion? Thanks, -m

-----Original Message-----
From: Taras Novak [mailto:taras@megapathdsl.net]
Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2001 5:15 PM
To: MDubinko@cardiff.com
Subject: question on reusable XForms UI components


Micah,

Current XForms WD has provisions for defining and using reusable UI 
components, a nice feature to have for real world applications that 
require rapid Web development.

Are there any plans for future WD to add XLink attributes to component 
element, that would allow to define reusable components in a separate 
XML document, and realize an import for the UI component definition via 
XLink or xform:linkingAttributes?

For example:

<component ref="myAddress" component="AddressWidget"
href="UIComponentLibrary.xml">
  <param name="streetPrompt" value="Shipping Street Address"/>
  <param name="zipPrompt" value="Zip Code for shipping state"/>
</component>

UIComponentLibrary.xml:

<!-- proper header -->
...

<defComponent id="AddressWidget">
  <param name="streetPrompt"/>
  <param name="zipPrompt"/>
  <group ref="address">
    <input ref="street">
      <caption><valueOf select="$streetPrompt"/></caption>
    </input>
    <input ref="zip">
      <caption><valueOf select="$zipPrompt"/></caption>
    </input>
  </group>
</defComponent>

..
<!-- Other components -->

If such mechanism is in place, a component can be defined separately 
from the XForms document, and reused in multiple XForms documents. This 
would be benefitial for maintenance of reusable UI components, and 
provide a possibility of creating UI component libraries that can be 
used by all Web applications that share the same data model, and/or 
provided by portal servers, etc.

If you consider this comment beneficial to XForms community, feel free 
to post it on the mailing list.

Thanks ahead for any comments you might have about this,
Taras

Received on Tuesday, 9 October 2001 17:40:01 UTC