XFoms "suspend and resume" support

--- Received from GA.PTODD 781 2758                          21-09-01 14.51

  -> www-forms@w3.org

Hi,

I work in an industry which has been using electronic forms for a few years
- the life insurance industry in the U.K.  We developed something like
XForms to handle our problems with distributed electronic forms, and in the
long-term, will probably migrate this work to take advantage of the XForms
standard.

Given the way our users work (they take laptops into client's houses and use
them in a disconnected way as well as creating websites for connected
access), we need to handle the same "suspend and resume" requirement that
XForms is looking at.

How it works for us depends on the implementation of the renderer (basically
on whether you're in a connected or disconnected world) but the underlying
technology of XForms is not restrained or defined by this. By allowing the
renderer to store the part-complete electronic form along with the data
which has been entered so far, we can let users fill in as much of the form
as they want at a time and fill in the rest later.

In the disconnected world, the user has a thick-client system with the
XForms and renderer on their machine. They have to worry about things like
back-ups of the "part-complete form and data entered so far", but this is
something which disconnected users have to worry about all the time; it is
not something specific to XForms.

In the connected world, the server retains a copy of the "part-complete form
and data entered so far", and can deliver it to whatever client system the
user wants; they can complete some of it on their desktop PC in the office,
save it to the server and have any unanswered questions delivered to their
WAP phone when they're in the client's house.

Phil



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Received on Friday, 21 September 2001 09:53:00 UTC