filter thoughts

Hi all,
	just a thought, but is there any reason that in a submission element 
there couldn't be attributes like:
outfilter="some-bind-or-embeddedxsltref or url"
infilter="some-bind-or-embeddedxsltref or url"
?
or even outfilterchain=""!

it would make submission processing far more powerful and could provide 
much simpler ways to reuse the same form for different datasets.
Wouldnt it solve a lot of the submission issues related to webservices 
by enabling a subset of any instance data to be aquired or saved for/to 
whatever format without re-tailoring an entire form with custom bits of 
essentially hardcoded data. XSLT can be built smart to dynamically 
assess the input XML and select its own appropriate output, so that 
loading data from various different known sources becomes much simpler. 
Imagine a single Xform that could load and submit from a whole variety 
of search engines for example (obviously the search engines would need 
to actually support XML output in order to facilitate loading of their 
data in our form).
I find myself doing this kind of thing serverside all the time in order 
to support my xforms anyway. I use it to ensure any missing elements and 
attributes exist for my forms, and to transform data to/from various 
formats including making nice human readable email submissions! Can 
anyone else see value in supporting this directly in the form?

it doesn't even need to restrict itself to xslt - let the filter itself 
define its own language, xslt, javascript, anything.

perhaps this is already possible with events and xslt in the container 
doc? not sure about that.

any thoughts?

Jason.

Received on Monday, 6 November 2006 01:14:22 UTC