Web Forms 2.0 Examples

This is a set of example forms chosen to match the set provided with XForms Transitional. The Web Forms 2.0 examples require a browser such as Opera 9 that includes native support.

• Data types, e.g. number and date
• Contraining field values with regular expressions
• Calculated fields using spreadsheet-like formulae
• Min and max values
• Range controls
• Validation expressions
• Required fields
• Relevant groups of fields
• Repeating fieldsets
• Initializing fieldsets
• Using radio buttons to determine relevancy
• Calculations involving selection fields
• Calculations involving checkboxes
• Referring to fields within named fieldsets
• Editable selection lists (combo boxes)

Web Forms 2.0 includes an extended set of data types compared to HTML4 Forms, and a range of other features, but you often have to resort to scripting for calculated field values, relevancy testing, and context sensitive validation constraints, etc. I have yet to come up with a demo for exporting Web Forms 2.0 to XForms as it is unclear how to analyse the associated scripts to identify the corresponding XForms bind constraints. This makes it difficult to automatically generate the server side validation scripts from Web Forms 2.0 pages. It also makes it impractical to round trip form semantics from the editor to the HTML document itself and back again to the editor, the next time you want to edit the document. An alternative would be to author using a declarative forms language such as XForms or XForms Transitional and to generate the Web Forms 2.0 page content from that.

Some additional examples are in preparation once I have found a work around a problem with Opera 9 for accessing updated values of repeated sets of fields.

Last updated $Date: 2007/03/25 16:34:49 $