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XForms Users Community Group

A group for XForms users to discuss the use of XForms and propose changes and additions to the markup.

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

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XForms Day 2015, November 5th 2015

This year’s XML Amsterdam is to host a pre-conference event devoted to XForms. XForms Day 2015 will provide:

  • An introduction to XForms and what to expect in version 2;
  • Case studies of how XForms is currently being used;
  • Presentations by XForms implementers;
  • Comparison with HTML5 forms.

The event, taking place on November 5th, is a great opportunity to learn about XForms and to talk with members of the W3C Working Group, implementers and users.

Asynchronous Javascript functions call

With XForms 2.0, it is possible to associate properties when dispatching events. It appears that, if this new feature can be also used from Javascript, asynchronous functions calls can be performed.

XForms 2.0 Specifications don’t mention how to dispatch an XML event with properties with Javascript instructions but, because it is a Javascript implementation, XSLTForms has its own internal way to do that, properties for events being a JSON object passed as a parameter: XsltForms_xmlevents.dispatch(target, name, type, bubbles, cancelable, defaultAction, evcontext).

Let’s consider a test case for getting geolocation within a form.

The Javascript part:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
function asynch() {
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(dispatch_position);
}
function dispatch_position(position) {
XsltForms_xmlevents.dispatch(document.getElementById(“modelid”),
“callbackevent”, null, null, null, null,
{
latitude: position.coords.latitude,
longitude: position.coords.longitude
});
}
</script>
and the model section:

<xf:model id=”modelid”>
<xf:instance id=”instanceid” xmlns=””>
<data>
<latitude/>
<longitude/>
</data>
</xf:instance>
<xf:load ev:event=”xforms-ready” resource=”javascript:asynch()”/>
<xf:action ev:event=”callbackevent”>
<xf:setvalue ref=”latitude” value=”event(‘latitude’)”/>
<xf:setvalue ref=”longitude” value=”event(‘longitude’)”/>
</xf:action>
</xf:model>

In this example, when the form is ready, the Javascript asynch() function is called. When the callback function show_map() is executed, the XsltForms_xmlevents.dispatch() method is called with the JSON object {latitude: position.coords.latitude,               longitude: position.coords.longitude} as last parameter. Then, in the XForms part, the event() function allows to get the corresponding values!

This is an elegant approach and it would be interesting to specify events dispatch from Javascript, don’t you think?

Editing ZIP Packages with XForms

Binary formats are declining now for ZIP packages and XML documents are frequent in them. Microsoft Open XML (for Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Open Document Format (for OpenOffice, LibreOffice) and EPUB are all using ZIP packages.

Any ZIP package is a flat collection of files and, eventually, folders. Files can refer to not-explicitly-defined folders by just mentioned them in their names. For example, “xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml” is a valid file name and no declaration is required for “xl” nor “worksheets” folders.

It is easy to extend XForms to allow ZIP packages editing:

First of all, mime types can be used to distinguish them. The default one is “application/zip” but there are many others such as “application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet” for Excel 2007. So, a mime type value can be used in a submission to indicate that a ZIP package will be sent or received.

An instance with such a mediatype can be initialized with @src but, if it is not possible, it has to be created with a temporary document. It means that when replacing an instance at the end of a submission, the mediatype is changed accordingly.

But, to access data in a ZIP package, a file name has to be provided. It implies that the instance() is to be called and that there must be an extra optional parameter for this file name. Adding a second parameter for the specific mediatype of the file might be helpful too. For example, to access the value of the B3 cell, the XPath expression will be: instance(‘myworkbook’,’xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml’)/ss:sheetData/ss:row[@r = 3]/ss:c[@r = ‘B3’]/ss:is/ss:t

This is enough for extracting XML data from any ZIP package and modify it before submitting the modified ZIP package.

This has been experimented in XSLTForms with well-known zip_inflate and zip_deflate Javascript functions written by Masanao Izumo (http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/amuse/javascript/expert/). For example, a form written with XSLTForms can be initialized with data coming from an Office file, it can modify it directly in the browser without the Microsoft Office Suite being installed locally.

For better Excel editing experience, XSLTForms uses XSLT to convert any shared string in an Excel sheet into an inline string. It allows to directly access and modify cell content in the same file. If formulas might have to be recalculated in the spreadsheets, instead of having to press Ctrl+Alt+F9, the simplest way is to add the attribute fullCalcOnLoad to the calcPr element in the workbook.xml document with “1” as value (this can easily be done with an insert action).

It is also easier to initialize the cells to be set with a dummy value because empty cells are not present in the XML serialization. A work instance with bindings to fill the Excel sheet is also a light way to design the form.

Full ZIP packages management would require to define extra actions to remove/add a file. But it is already possible to create a template ZIP package with the exact number of required files (for Excel, each sheet is represented a distinct file, itself being listed in other files).

Here is the example for this: http://www.agencexml.com/xsltforms/Workbook-Editor.xml

Handling mouse events in XForms

I produced a quick XForm to demonstrate how to do mouse handling. You can find it here: http://www.cwi.nl/~steven/forms/mouse.xml

Try clicking, double clicking, mouse wheel moves. I commented out mouse-move events, since so many of them are generated.

You can also see shift/alt/ctrl/meta keys working on mouse-down events (they work on other events, but I only show them on mouse-down).

Health hacks and XForms

I thought you might be interested in an XForms based web application www.forms4health.com – the foundation for which was created at a 2-day health hack known as NHS hack-day (NHS is the National Health Service in the UK).

At the hack I proposed an electronic forms based application specifically for pre-operative assessments (essentially a set of questions designed to ascertain the background health and associated anaesthetic risk for patient scheduled for surgery). As I had previous experience of XForms I wanted to use XForms to create the front end of the application. The main requirements I had were a good fit for XForms – see below:

  • The form should be as intuitive as possible for the patients:
    • This meant that the form should be based upon clearly laid out sections – in this case I used the <xf:switch/> statement to present different sections.
    • Questions posed to the patient depend on their previous answers – here I used a mixture of <xf:group ref=”.[conditional statement]”> and <xf:bind id=”SomeId” relevant=”conditional statement”/> <xf:select1 bind=”SomeId”/>
    • Errors on the form needed to be clearly highlighted to the user with associated help/hint text – a feature directly supported by XForms
    • The form needed to be “pretty” – Not being a UI expert I used Twitter’s bootstrap to help style the form. This is still work in progress and I did need to figure out a few things but the integration so far with XSLTForms has not too been too painful.
  • Options for select controls need to be sourced externally.
    • In the current version of forms4health I have used a simple XML data models.
    • In a full blown application these may be more complex in be sourced from an standalone terminology server.
    • Either way the use of <xf:model/> and the <xf:itemset/> allows this information to be losley coupled to the form.
  • The results of the form need to be sent/saved as XML
    • The healthcare administrator “booking” the assessment has a choice of PDF or XML as the output of the form submission – here I used XForms to send the XML to a background Java servlet that either forwarded the XML directly or created a PDF via XSL:FO / FOP.
    • Where XML is requested this is typically for integration with the healthcare institution’s own systems, however the specific XML may vary depending on healthcare facility. This implies the need for lose coupling between the UI and the data – The MVC architecture of XForms allows this coupling to be defined declaratively.
  • The form needs to be available on a variety of platforms
    • In theory this is well aligned with XForms however (and I may be wrong) for now I think the majority of XForms applications are still being developed as web-sites/embeded in HTML.  I used XSTLForms as this supports a large number of web browsers, however I have pre-processed (transformed) the xml files to html to ensure as wide a compatibility as possible (you will be able to see the difference between http://www.forms4health.com/registration.html and http://www.forms4health.com/registration.xml if you do “view source”)
  • The form and associated functionality needed to be developed quickly
    • The declarative nature of XForms allowed us to build upon the excellent foundation provided by XForms to rapidly generate working applications

Overall XForms was great for being able to quickly create a very usable application with relatively simple/lightweight backend logic to produce a workable application. I am hoping the demo site will provide enough inspiration for an NHS (or other healthcare provider) organisation to sponsor the development of a fully functioning service.

XForms 2.0 new features and limitations due to id attribute use

With XForms 2.0, the switch control can have a new attribute named caseref. It can be very useful for authors in common situations: many forms require conditional parts according to a expression value. With this new attribute, the XForms switch control is more similar to the Java/C switch statement

Authors with XForms usually use a workaround based on as many group controls and XPath predicates as necessary, as in <group ref=”mycontext[mycondition_1]”>…</group><group ref=”mycontext[mycondition_2]…</group>…

There is still a restriction because of the use of the id attribute: a case as to be unique in a form because it is identified with its id attribute value.

For big forms, for subforms, for switchs, the id attribute is too restrictive. The new var element is using the name attribute instead. Next version of XForms could benefit in getting ride of the id attribute and replacing it with the name attribute. XSLTForms is already generating missing ids according to the position of the element in the tree and ids could be generated from names with a similar approach without a big effort.

What do you think?

[poll id=”1″]

Thanks!

-Alain

List of Implementations Migrated to Community Group

The list of XForms Implementations that used to be maintained by the XForms Working Group has now been migrated to the Community Group Wiki.

Community Group members are encouraged to keep this up-to-date, and improve the entries for their own implementations.

New releases and upgrade releases announced in the news (though not daily releases) should be moved to the top of the list at the time of announcement so that the most active implementations bubble to the top of the list over time.