Tech Paper: Using XForms in Office Applications

Hello,

  The XML 2004 Conference proceedings are now online
including the tech paper by Lars Oppermann (Sun)
titled "Using XForms in Office Applications".

  The summary states:

  This paper addresses the use of the W3C XForms
standard in a general-purpose office application.

XForms allows for the manipulation and processing of
highly structured XML content while providing means of
input validation and business logic inside the form.
Through the integration of XForms support into an
office application, the user is enabled to work with
arbitrarily structured XML data in a convenient and
well-known environment.

The XForms integration into StarOffice and
OpenOffice.org that the author shows here supports the
user in the design phase of the form, as well as
during data entry and validation in the deployed form.

Form design and data entry are integrated into the
existing program modules allowing the user to work
with forms in a known environment.

Due to the standardization of XForms, the forms are
usable with any other XForms compliant application.
This enables the use of a general purpose productivity
suite to work with arbitrarily structured XML data,
where otherwise specifically customized tools would be
needed. The special benefit of this particular
combination is the possibility of combining structured
data and free form content into a single document.

Since the OASIS Open Office XML format is used for
free form content, all information that was entered by
the user is stored in a well-structured and
standardized way which can be processed by any given
application throughout a work flow. For instance, XSLT
can be used to create any required XML format from the
combination of XForms instance data and document
content.

Examples will be given to demonstrate the outlined
combination of standards into the OpenOffice.org
application, including the manipulation of OASIS UBL
instance data through a customized form and the
preparation of an XML 2004 conference paper in
OpenOffice.org through the combination of XForms, XML
based word processing and XSLT. 

   Full paper online @
http://www.idealliance.org/proceedings/xml04/papers/110/xml2004_ideadb.html

   - Gerald

-----------------------
Gerald Bauer
XUL News Wire - http://xulnews.com
XUL Alliance  - http://xulalliance.org

______________________________________________________________________ 
Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca

Received on Thursday, 13 January 2005 02:01:15 UTC