ebMS submission

Dear all,

Please forgive this late foray into discussion of XForms, but I have only
recently begun to look into a particular application scenario and have some
brief observations which I trust may be useful to a future version.

Whilst addressing the following points (either separately or together) could
be useful in many other applications, it is my hope that together they will
enable instance data to be submitted as the *application payload* of an [ebMS
2.0] <http://www.ebxml.org/specs/ebMS2.pdf> message: that is, instance data
could be serialized into a
[SOAPAttach]<http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-attachments-20001211>attachment.

I suspect this could prove to be a popular use case for XForms (e.g. user
edits a [UBL 2.0]
<http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/cs-UBL-2.0/UBL-2.0.html>document using
an XForm and submits it directly over [ebMS
2.0] <http://www.ebxml.org/specs/ebMS2.pdf>, which is the particular
scenario I am currently investigating)—however it would appear that, as
things stand, any such implementation must handle the
xforms-submit-serialize event and define the necessary serialization
explicitly?

With reference to the [XForms 1.1]
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms11/>specification, I see two specific
hurdles:

   1. §11.11.3 states that "the method attribute of the submission
must<http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-xforms-20091020/#intro-reading>be
set to
   get or post in order to access the SOAP HTTP binding", thereby precluding
   use of the multipart-post method and making any implementation of
   [SOAPAttach]
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-attachments-20001211>more
complex; and
   2. §11.9.6 defines the multipart/related serialization specifying that,
   after the root, there are subsequent body parts "for each node with a
   datatype of xsd:anyURI populated by upload", thereby precluding XML
   instance data or other generated content from appearing elsewhere than in
   the first body part.

As an aside and whilst [WebSocket] <http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/> is
still in draft form, I think it conceivable that submission over such a
persistent transport could be desirable in the future.  It's feasible to
accomplish this with client side scripting, however there does not appear to
be any access through the DOM to an XForm's serialization and therefore any
such script must recreate the form's serialization for itself.  Perhaps a
DOM method (e.g. getSerialization() or similar) could be useful?

Grateful for your thoughts and comments.

Kind regards,
Alexi Margo


[ebMS 2.0] http://www.ebxml.org/specs/ebMS2.pdf
[SOAPAttach] http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-attachments-20001211
[UBL 2.0] http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/cs-UBL-2.0/UBL-2.0.html
[WebSocket] http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/
[XForms 1.1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-attachments-20001211