Re: controls and instance nodes

On 2/20/06, Erik Bruchez <erik@bruchez.org> wrote:
> I find the idea of custom controls extremely interesting and promising.
> This is something we have been thinking about for a long time as well,
> an it is great to see that it is on WG members' radar. Orbeon will be
> one more voice in favor of doing some work in this area.
>
> But I am not 100% convinced that Richard's question necessarily requires
> such custom controls. Our approach to his problem was more in the line
> of introducing input masks to XForms. Input masks are a more specific
> solution, where you define a format for the input, and the XForms engine
> does the rest.

Agreed. It would be nice if it was not necessary to add a custom
control to do this.

> Has anybody already started thinking about whether such input masks make
> sense in general in XForms, or even made proposals? What are the pros
> and cons of both approaches? Clearly, the "custom control" approach
> covers more use cases, but it is also likely to be more cumbersome for
> simple cases such as entering an SSN.

I cannot answer all your questions :) But a control could also
"inspect" the schema type of an instance node and the represent it
"intelligently". Easier said than done, I know :) And schemas... not
the easiest thing to grasp.

--
... Allan

Received on Monday, 20 February 2006 14:54:53 UTC