Hi folks,
I'm working on a project prototype where I'm trying to implement a kind of
"wizard" using XMLForms. The difference is that I'd like the XML docs
written by the content people to define the resulting XML doc, without
specifying it ahead of time. In other words, I'd like the elements &
attributes to be built by the XPath commands that originate from the XForm
ref attributes. I'm using 2.1-dev, a fairly fresh snapshot.
The design of the Form class in Cocoon at this point is that all the
elements must be present ahead of time, or one get silent failures
("Invalid data format" could be a little more descriptive when the failure
is because there is no matching path). This design makes sense when
working with Beans as your Model, but could (should?) be more flexible
with DOM; for example, if there is an either/or construct in your DTD
( <!ELEMENT myelement (sub1 | sub2) > ), and each sub element complex, you
can't ahead of time know how to generate a DOM object that will have a
given element available to XPath.
Would it make sense within the scope of XMLForms in Cocoon to add the
ability within the the Form class to add new elements to the DOM object
when they are missing? It seems that this should be fairly simple: just
define an AbstractFactory for the DOM, and use it within the Form class
whenenver an access to an element fails for a DOM. Where the
AbstractFactory would come from etc is a good question, though.
The reason I ask is that alternatively I could use something like Castor
to rebuild a Bean for the expected XML document, biting the bullet that I
can't hand over full control of the XML creation to the content creators.
If people think that it's a good idea and doable to allow XMLForms to
build a DOM based on the XForms elements, then I
would strongly consider working on these modifications; otherwise I would
probably take the path of least resistance & go with a basic Bean
approach.
thanx for your input,
rob
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