Re: url params et al

Thanks Mark,
	and everyone else that contributed to my question.
You obviously understand exactly what the problem is and I had come up 
with much the same options, it just seems weird that this is not a 
straightforward thing to do without intervention by other tech.
I think I'll go the route of the jsp/ssi thing for now.
As for the store local suggestions, they are only going to be useful if 
I am jumping from one xform to another, but I am launching in this case 
direct from an email link so I dont think a local save helps because I 
cant local save from an email before I launch the xform in question -so 
I wont have any data to pick up and use.

again thanks for your generous thoughts

Jason.


Mark Birbeck wrote:
> 
> Leigh,
> 
>> I think this processing rightfully belongs on the server, as the URI
>> specifies the resource, and the server is responsible for providing you
>> the resource.
> 
> But you don't know what the resource is until you construct it...and
> that construction doesn't belong on the server.
> 
> 
>> I'm not sure what XForms processor you're using, but in browsers that
>> support JavaScript handlers, you can ask the browser what the page URI
>> was (via the location property).
> 
> That's what I am suggesting...but that's the easy bit. What we don't
> have is a *standard* way to put the values we want into the URL.
> 
> Take something like Slidey, the W3C's HTML presentation viewer, which
> uses script to take an ordinary HTML document and make it behave like
> a presentation. You can give someone a URL which will take them to a
> specific slide, like this:
> 
>  http://skimstone.x-port.net/files/rdfa-slides.html#(18)
> 
> and as you rightly say it's no big deal to extract the fragment
> identifier and use it as a parameter. But unfortunately that's only
> one parameter, and we might need more. And we also might want to name
> the paramaters, in the same way that we do when passing parameters to
> the server. So my suggestion was to have a standardised syntax for
> client-side parameters in HTML documents, along the lines of:
> 
>  http://skimstone.x-port.net/files/rdfa-slides.html#param(slide=18)
> 
> When this technique is applied to XForms, it means we can have forms
> that are delivered from the server that require no server-side
> processing, meaning they are independent of any particular server
> software. Of course we will need server-side processing for other
> things, but with this technique you can reserve that processing for
> the generation and handling of the instance data (which if you use
> REST/SOAP/XQuery, etc., you once again remove any dependence on a
> particular set of software, like ASP, PHP, JSP, etc.).
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mark
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: www-forms-request@w3.org [mailto:www-forms-request@w3.org] On
>> Behalf Of Jason
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2006 11:46 PM
>> To: www-forms@w3.org
>> Subject: url params et al
>>
>>
>> Hi all -I think I'm going quietly mad. I have a small problem that I
>> haven't had to deal with via xforms before (I think) and cant seem to
>> see the solution - it must be easy, I'm sure of it.
>> I need to launch an xform with a given data id passed as an url
>> parameter (the url will come from an email). eg:
>> http://.../somexform?id=abcd
>>
>> the form then needs to load data with id=abcd (or at least something
>> derived from it).
>>
>> my question is how can I do this without dynamically modifying the xform
>>
>> itself each time. I dont really want to store the id in a session
>> variable and have the form retrieve it on form-ready, I'd like to know
>> if its possible with a pure xform, or at least a nicer approach to this
>> one. This would be trivial if the initial request was via the xform, but
>>
>> how do you preset a forms' state for startup without having the form
>> request the info itself?
>>
>> any thoughts? I think my head must be full of cotton wool.
>>
>> thanks
>> Jason.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 23 August 2006 23:20:30 UTC