Event Context Info

Hello everyone,

 

We are looking at providing a more seamless integration/mapping of data
between our XForms implementation and underlying O/R framework.  One
item we need to enable this is the ability for a user (form designer) to
create event observers that listen for DOM mutation events to do for
example; set the value of a modified flag/node to true (or a date-time)
when a row in a homogenous collection is modified (so that we can
synchronize the changes back to the O/R data-source).  However, we are
having difficultly in finding a way to implement this is a non
proprietary fashion since, from what we have seen, there is no mechanism
for accessing event context information within an action or set of
actions.  For the example above, we need to know the node that was
modified (or at least its index/XPath location string with respect to a
homogenous collection) in order to use the setvalue action to set the
modified node for the corresponding row.    The XForms spec mentions
several events (xforms-submit-error, xforms-insert, xforms-delete) that
have additional contextual information (beyond target,  bubbles,
canceable, etc...).  But how can we access this information within
actions? I was hoping to see an xforms:eventContext function or similar
mechanism that would provide access to the event context data structure.
But I have not seen that yet.  Does anyone know if there are plans to
add such functionality?  Alternatively, we could use a script handler
vs. a XForms action group to accomplish the functionality.  However, in
the XML Events spec we saw no mechanism for accessing the event context
info either, such as an implicit event object made available in the
scripting environment.

 

Any insights appreciated!

 

Thanks,

Shone Sadler

http://www.qlinktech.com