Re: Loading & saving documents

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