RE: Partial form submissions and optional fields

Eric,

The goal for XForms is to submit XML. If there's _nothing_, not even a root
element, then it's not well-formed XML. So yes, we want to be able to submit
a subset of the instance data, but only if that subset is non-zero!

On selectOne, we are making that form control strictly always select one
thing.

All this and more is addressed in our upcoming draft.

Thanks,

.micah

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Fu [mailto:ericfu@etrieve.com]
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2001 2:06 PM
To: www-forms@w3.org
Subject: Partial form submissions and optional fields


I have a couple of questions regarding the current working draft (Aug. 28,
2001): 

1) Section 11.5.1.3.1 has a restriction that the instance data can not have
an empty node-set, otherwise the form submission will be aborted. 

This obviously singles out the case where a form that is partially filled in
gets submitted. 

In real life, that can happen if the user decide to submit the form for
later review. 
 
Does the WG plan to address this issue in the next draft?

2) Similarly on a related problem - and again drawing from real life -
certain fields of a form can be optionally fill in by the user, i.e.
intentionally left blank. If this happens on a "SelectOne" field then the
validation certainly have to validate the case where the field is left
empty.

I hope the WG can come up with the right syntactic to address these
problems. (Or is it already hidden in the current draft, in which case
please kind enough to point it out)


cheers,

Eric 

Received on Monday, 3 December 2001 13:36:41 UTC