Re: Invitation to contribute examples

Greetings, I did not mean to imply that people's comments are not welcome,
on the contrary they are most welcome. What I was referring to was a thread
that was exploring the difficulties that arose as a result of the
restriction that one model cannot refer to another.

This restriction does exist and it does restrict some of the things that
people would like to achieve. My note was simply pointing out that a subset
of those problems can be addressed by the additional feature added to
<submitInfo> which allows an subset of an instance to be submitted.

Scenarios such as you have described below do actually exist though other
solutions could be devised. For example, XFORMS could be modified to allow
a set of external documents to be concatenated into an instance, or
non-XForms but still XML based solutions such as XInclude could play a
part.

What I want to clearly understand is whether people really want multiple
models which can refer to each other or whether this is an attempt to work
around an XForms restriction which could be solved in other ways. What your
example points out is a situation where I could create a single
model/instance if I was prepared/able to place all the content inline, but
I cannot achieve the same effect if some or all of the content is to be
sourced from a separate document or documents.

Regards, Roland
Ease of Use Strategy
Tel: +44 (0)1926-465440,   Fax: +44 (0)1926-465323, Mobile:  +44
(0)773-0300-937
Internet: Roland_Merrick@uk.ibm.com
Ease of Use:     http://www.ibm.com/easy/           http://w3.ibm.com/easy/


                                                                                                            
                    Jérôme Nègre                                                                            
                    <jerome.negre@e-xm       To:     Roland Merrick/UK/IBM@IBMGB                            
                    lmedia.fr>               cc:     "Steven Pemberton" <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>,          
                                              <www-forms@w3.org>                                            
                    10/01/2002 12:11         Subject:     Re: Invitation to contribute examples             
                                                                                                            
                                                                                                            
                                                                                                            




> Greetings, things are not as bad as people seem to be implying here.

I wonder who you're talking about ?
I have a few remarks on the *draft*, so I'm saying them. Once it'll be a
recommendation, it'll be too late.

<snip>
> I know this doesn't fix the cross model issue that you have recognised
but
> is does reduce the number of practical, rather than theoretical,
situations
> where the form designer might have had to resort to two models.

In my example, everything was inline and made simple to be concise.
Let's go for a real-life, pratical example. I hope you'll like it.

Let's say I'm running an e-commerce site.
I have a XML catalog at http://mysite.com/catalog.xml.
Since my customers can save their basket between sessions, the current
basket of a customer is available at http://mysite.com/basket.xml
(identification being made with the help of cookies or whatever).
Of course, my form needs some working variables.
I might end up with something like that:

<html>
 <head>
  <xform:model id="catalog">
   <xform:instance xlink:href="http://mysite.com/catalog.xml"/>
...
  <xform:model id="basket">
   <xform:instance xlink:href="http://mysite.com/basket.xml"/>
...
  <xform:model id="working_variables">
   <xform:instance>
    ...
   </xform:instance>
...
</html>

So, this is a practical situation, how do you rewrite it with only one
model
? Of course, it isn't allowed to write a server-side script, you must use
pure XForms.

Regards,
Jérôme

Received on Thursday, 10 January 2002 07:55:44 UTC