- From: Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer <schnitz@demaledetti.net>
- Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2005 20:17:30 +0200
- To: "Flinton Adam" <Adam.Flinton@cfh.nhs.uk>
- CC: www-forms@w3.org
Adam, > i.e. use IE + Novell plugin or possibly mozilla/firefox when it's ready > (or even OpenOffice possibly) to open an Xforms document & then use it > to populate it's model by opening another xml file of the requisite > structure/followng the correct schema & then after editing the XML > through the Xform UI to do a save/save as. > > Any ideas? To my knowledge, this isnīt really possible right away, and I think it is unfortunate. However, I can encourage XForms implementers to provide such a functionality specifically in their user agent, since I do think this is a feature that can be a XForms processor specific add-on goodie without necessarily having the W3C to define additional specification wording. Just like a browser shows the current web address in the location bar, another location bar could pop up when an XForms is loaded, for instance. Another good and easy place for this in Mozilla Firefox could be the rather useful XForms Buddy [1] by Allan Beaufour, it sits in the lower right corner of the browser and when clicking on it provides useful information about the loaded xforms, e.g. showing the instance actively changing thru user interaction, it would be easy for Allan to add a Load/Save instance there :-) For now also you could just go the other way around, associate every instance with the corresponding XForms with some web application glue, so every instance gets a link added to its xforms when accessing it thru some server middleware, where the link triggers another server-side application that gets the xforms and writes the instance you are calling from as its instance, e.g.: http://mywebapp.com/edit?xform=/myforms/...&instance=/myinstances/... (or even without the &instance= if you use the HTTP Referrer) would return that xforms with the corresponding instance. But definitely having XForms processors add a means for the _end user_ not the _form author_ to open and save an instance in a loaded XForms would be the best way to go and a really low hanging fruit as well since XForms already provides all the underlying plumbing and architecture for this, so maybe this could be added quickly, implementers? :-) - Sebastian [1] http://www.beaufour.dk/blog-archives/2005/09/xforms_buddy_04.html
Received on Wednesday, 5 October 2005 01:03:19 UTC