Last Call Comment - Links in model instance

This proposal addresses two cases that come up in form design:

1. The need for 'temporary' variables
2. Pulling instance data from more than one source.

The current XForm spec allows the 'instance' node of model to either define
inline content or to declare an XLink from which to pull the instance data.
This seems limiting. It does not allow the form designer to add any
variables to the instance data and it does not allow instance data to be
pulled from more than one source.

I would propose a method to insert XML data pulled from an XLink reference
into a sub-tree of model/instance.

<model>
<instance>
  <hiddenvariable1 />
  <hiddenvariable2 />
  <zipcodeinfo />
  <profiledata />
</instance>
<externalInstanceData ref="zipcodeinfo" xlink:href="..." />
<externalInstanceData ref="profiledata" xlink:href="..." />
 ...
</model>

When the model is initialized, whatever XML data is retrieved from the
xlink:href would be inserted under the node indicated by the ref attribute.


Tom Keane
Director, Core Technologies
CARDIFF, Inc.
www.cardiff.com <http://www.cardiff.com> 
tkeane@cardiff.com <mailto:tkeane@cardiff.com> 

Received on Friday, 22 February 2002 19:20:10 UTC