Menu,Messages,NavigationTree

Hello,

at first I want to say that XForms is very good advancement of HTML-Forms.

But while working with XForms I had some problems concerning the following
items. Therefore here are some suggestions:

(1) Messageboxes
	Use Case : Maybe the user should be asked before starting
		the submission whether he really wants to or not. (“Are you sure?  Yes /
No”)
	Propososal:
		Messages should get a type (is it a confirmation or a warning) and one
can assign the possible  		choices.
		<message type=”confirmation | question | information | warning” ref=”...” >
			<label>Are you sure ?</label>
			<item><label>Yes</label><value>y</value></item>
			<item><label>No</label><value>n</value></item>
		</message>
		 The type-attribute can result in different sounds or icons. (Depends on
the XForms-Processor)
(2) It should be possible to insert new (different) nodes in the
datamodell , e.g. if a <trigger> is "pressed". XForms:insert allows only
to insert nodes of the same structure.
(3) Most of todays applications have menubars. In xforms  simple menus can
be definied only with select1,but the representation is not what the user
suppose  to see.  A secound way is to use switch/cases to “simulate”
menuitems and submenuitems. Although this works fine (also with
subsubsubmenus) the UI-description becomes very complex (and it's not the
spirit of xforms).
A better way whould be the possibilty to give xforms:triggers a
menu-like-structure:
	<menu>
		<submenu>
			<label>..</label>
			<trigger>...</trigger>
			<trigger>...</trigger>
			<trigger>...</trigger>
			<submenu>
				<label>..</label>
				<trigger>...</trigger>
				<trigger>...</trigger>
			</submenu>
		</submenu>
		<submenu>
			<label>..</label>
			<trigger>...</trigger>
			<trigger>...</trigger>
		</submenu>
	</menu>

(4) Some of our applications use trees for navigation. These trees are
created with JavaScript. Maybe one should integrate trees into XForms,
because trees are still widely used  in common desktop applications.
In XForms it is possible to define <choices>  in <select1>. Only
FormsPlayer (with appearance=compact) shows it as a tree.  And like
<optgroups> in HTML there are only two levels allowed. Maybe one should
extend the meaning of <choices>  for declaring tree-structures.

In my opinion, these items are an improvement of XForms and could be
included into 1.1.

Greetings,

Steffen Büder
Robotron Database Software
Oracle Certified Partner

Received on Monday, 1 March 2004 05:49:07 UTC