Re: [ANN] formsPlayer 1.5.0.1035 / Tablet PCs / Text submission results

Hi Mark,

Congratulations, that's great news.  I've just updated the group's public 
site to add the announcement to the news.

Regarding your support for submissions that return text, again that's 
great news.

Just moments ago, I finished the grueling task of creating the first draft 
of XForms 1.1 full spec (not delta).
Did I mention it was gruelling?

Anyway, the very last thing I noticed that I thought worthy of *adding* a 
note about pertains to the xforms-submit-serialize event.
Because the submission-body context property is a string, it seems to me 
that this feature also allows one to *submit* non-XML data!
But no pressure :-)

Well, maybe a little: Regarding the instance-error attribute you are 
experimenting with, I would comment that it is not necessary in XForms 1.1 
because the xforms-submit-error contains the returned response in the 
response-body context property, which means you can use a simple handler 
for that event to put the data whereever you want.  Note that if the 
submission response is XML, then it is parsed and the response-body 
returns the node, so you can use insert to copy it somewhere.  If the 
response is not XML, then response-body is a string, so you can use 
setvalue to put it somewhere.  Finally, note that the response header are 
also available, so you should be able to write the conditional logic to 
make the choice (which is something you could not do right now with the 
instance-error attribute).

Cheers,
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM: Workplace Forms Architect and Researcher
Co-Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com  http://www.ibm.com/software/

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer





"Mark Birbeck" <mark.birbeck@x-port.net> 
Sent by: www-forms-request@w3.org
11/14/2006 10:30 AM
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mark.birbeck@x-port.net


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Subject
[ANN] formsPlayer 1.5.0.1035 / Tablet PCs / Text submission results







Hello all,

The latest release of formsPlayer 1.5 has:

  * improved support for Tablet PC's;
  * support for submissions that return text (from XForms 1.1);
  * support for the new 'target' attribute on submission (from XForms 
1.1);
 * support for an experimental 'instance-error' attribute on submission;
  * additional control over CSS, such as styling 'hints' in different ways
   depending on the parent control's MIPs.


TABLET PCs

Some new features have been added to formsPlayer to support the needs
of one of our customers in the insurance industry. We've some ideas
about other features that could be added, but we're keen to get
feedback from users may have experience using Tablet's in other areas,
including in non-XForms solutions. If you have any suggestions or
comments for the kinds of features that would be useful, they would be
most welcome:

  <http://skimstone.x-port.net/node/add/project_issue/formsplayer/feature>

For some screenshots on what we have so far, see Phil's blog:

  <http://skimstone.x-port.net/node/446>


SUBMISSION

The new release also includes a few new submission features.

The first supports requests that return text values. Paul has blogged
about it here:

  <http://skimstone.x-port.net/node/423>

and he links through to some examples and a discussion of the feature,
which is defined in XForms 1.1:

  <http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms11/#attrib-submit-replace>

Another new submission feature is the ability to indicate where the
returned data should be stored. This is important when returning text,
since XForms can only store data in XML, so simple text would need to
be placed in an element or attribute. This feature is also defined in
XForms 1.1:

  <http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms11/#attrib-submit-target>

The last new feature in submission is the ability to indicate where to
place any XML returned by a failed submission--something that is
important when using protocols such as SOAP, which use HTTP error
codes to indicate failure, but can still return useful XML data. This
is an experimental feature, and we'd appreciate any feedback.


CSS

The release also includes various improvements in CSS styling. One
such improvement is that 'hints' can now have their style set based on
the status of their parent control; for example, a hint could be
styled differently depending on whether the control is valid or
invalid.


All release notes are available here:

  <http://skimstone.x-port.net/node/262/release>

Best regards,

Mark

-- 
Mark Birbeck
CEO
x-port.net Ltd.

e: Mark.Birbeck@x-port.net
t: +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
w: http://www.formsPlayer.com/
b: http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/

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