RE: UI representations of data model

Teach me to press send without rereading what I was sending.

One point to add to my confusion. If you do include things like hidden and
multiline attributes in my <input> elements below then its assuming knowledge
of the type of the data item in the model. How do I know user_description is a
string (and not some structured complex type)? 

My assumption is that the person writing the UI representation has this
knowledge. Not sure if thats a good assumption though.

Andy


On 30-Oct-2000 Andy Hird wrote:
> Hi there, 
> I'm currently working on a project which involves me implementing an
> XForms-like processing engine.
> 
> I'm interested in a couple of things - the current state of the XForms spec.
> and any work done on the UI parts of the XForm spec (especially representing
> elements in the data model to the user and how current HTML Form mappings can
> be represented using the XForm datamodel and UI split).
> 
> The current implementation is split into a data model view (heavily based on
> the April working draft but incorparating XML Schema types and restraints)
> and
> a UI model I came up with (basically multiple page representations of data
> models - a form is a graph of pages with submit buttons being directed links
> between page nodes in the graph - to allow wizard like forms as well as
> traditional single page forms).
> 
> What I'm really interested in is how people see the mapping between data
> model
> elements and their representation in the UI (and visa versa).
> 
> For example (using current HTML Forms to get data from a user) a string data
> type is pretty simple - it maps straight onto the current Form <input
> type="string"> element. 
> 
> But how is <input type="password"> represented in the datamodel/UI split? Is
> the password quality just a UI dependent representation of a string or is
> password ie. something like:
> <datamodel>
> 
> <xform:string name="user_password">
> 
> .....
> 
> <ui>
> 
> <input name="user_password" hidden="yes"/>
> 
> OR:
> 
> <xform:string name="user_password" secret="yes" encrypt="yes"/>
> 
> sort of thing?
> 
> A similar thing happens with multi line strings (<textarea> elements in
> HTML).
> Should it be:
> <xform:string name="user_description"/>
> ....
> <input name="user_description" multiline="yes"/>
> 
> or
> 
> <datamodel>
> <xform:string name="user_description" multiline="yes"/> (infact should
> multiline
> even need to be specified?)
> 
> I'm tending towards the former representation in both cases. Both the
> propertys
> password and multiline seem like UI dependent issues (although whether
> a string can be multiline could be a restriction on the string data type).
> 
> Has anyone done any work with this sort of thing? What sort of ideas are
> people
> coming up with here? 
> 
> Andy

Received on Sunday, 29 October 2000 21:41:40 UTC