Re: Styling based on instance data

Greetings Adrian, I believe that the answer to your question is yes. A 
long time ago I looked at associating an error explanation with a 
constraint to provide what you seem to be looking for. This would allow 
you to associate an alert with each constraint MIP as well as with the 
type MIP. The biggest weakness in this approach though is the problems of 
explaining which of potentially many schema restrictions have failed. I 
did have discussion with the XML Schema folks about indicating in the PSVI 
precisely which restriction failed but did not get to a conclusion. 

Regards, Roland
Tel/Fax: +44 (0)1926-465440
Mobile: +44 (0)77 2520-0620



Adrian Baker <adrian@fastmail.net> 
07/12/2006 23:29

To
www-forms <www-forms@w3.org>
cc
Roland Merrick/UK/IBM@IBMGB
Subject
Re: Styling based on instance data






Could the possibility of having multiple constraints also be used to 
provide a mechanism to link specific alert texts to particular 
constraints?

One irritation I have is deriving a nice specific alert for fields which 
can be invalid for mulitple reasons (multiple constraints plus a datatype 
restriction).

Adrian

Roland Merrick wrote: 

Greetings Mark, I acrefully avoided the how in my response I was just 
describing another use case. 

However, on the subject of how I tend to agree with the approach you 
describe. XForms 1.0 had a restriction that there could only be one MIP of 
a particular types associated with an instance data node. This was 
reasonable for all the MIPs except @constraint but kept the rule simple. 

I would like to see the restriction of a single @constraint being lifted 
and at the same time introduce a new attribute along the lines you suggest 
that there can also be multiples of. This would allow an author to specify 
multiple constraints and multiple states that can be used for "styling". 

  <xf:bind id="overdue" nodeset="books/book" state="today() &gt; @due" /> 

If I then wanted to add another state, for eample hardcover vs softcover I 
could do that as well without a need to touch the original binding. 

  <xf:bind id="cover" nodeset="books/book" state="@cover = 'hard'" /> 

The styles would then be linked to the MIP@state of a particular bind ID. 

Regards, Roland
Tel/Fax: +44 (0)1926-465440
Mobile: +44 (0)77 2520-0620 


"Mark Birbeck" <mark.birbeck@x-port.net> 
Sent by: www-forms-request@w3.org 
01/12/2006 15:40 

Please respond to
mark.birbeck@x-port.net



To
www-forms <www-forms@w3.org> 
cc
www-forms-request@w3.org 
Subject
Re: Styling based on instance data









Hi Roland,

> I would agree that there are cases where styling dependent
> on the value would be useful. A situation I have encountered is the need 
to style
> negative numbers differently to positive numbers.

We could still keep this as styling based on 'state' though, with
negative and positive being different states. Myself and Paul Butcher
(one of my colleagues) tested to see if a generic solution based on
state was workable, and found that it probably could be done.

I'll try to find the details, but it essentially went like this; if
you think of the MIPs, such as relevant, readonly, and so on, they all
control a pair of events and a pair of CSS pseudo-classes. To make
this generic all we need is a way to describe these two pairs.

So lets say that we have a system that has a business rule concerning
whether a library book is overdue or not; we know that we'd like a
pair of events called "xforms-mip-overdue-on" and
"xforms-mip-overdue-off", say, and we'd also like some pseudo classes
like ':mip-overdue-on' and ':mip-overdue-off' to allow us to style
data that is in this state. By making the names of the events and
pseudo-classes follow a clearly defined pattern, we could just use a
single attribute to specify the whole thing:

 <style type="text/css">
   :mip-overdue-on { color: red; }
 </style>

 <xf:bind nodeset="books/book" overdue="today() &gt; @due" />

It's probably not a good idea to allow any old attribute on 'bind', so
one possibility would be to put these 'soft MIP' attributes into a
different namespace:

 <xf:bind nodeset="books/book" mip:overdue="today() &gt; @due" />

Any attribute in this namespace would be treated as a 'soft' MIP, and
the events and pseudo-classes created accordingly, with the default
names.

There are other ways to express the mark-up, but I'd have to dig up
some of the (very old) notes that myself and Paul made to recall the
ones that we came up with. I do remember that we played with having a
new element that defines the names of the events and pseudo-classes,
but that may be more powerfull that is needed.

Anyway, I thought it worth posting these thoughts since they might
spark some ideas amongst others.

Regards,

Mark

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