Hello Jim, As a preliminary note, you're somewhat on the wrong list here ... One of the main Base developers - me - participated in the development of OOo's XForms capabilities, simply because we wanted to re-use the existing form controls when embarking upon XForms support, and I am in charge of form controls.
However, that's effectively the only connection between XForms and Base. There were never plans to connect both worlds. Which doesn't mean the connection would not make sense - the opposite is true -, but simply that the whole "XForms in OOo" story never got the resources and engagement which would have been necessary to finish it. That's the current state: The implementation of some rudiments was finished, but no further ideas/visions have been developed, not to mention spending precious UX/developer time for it. You might regret this (as do I in some sense, since the topic itself is promising), but effectively, there was a decision to focus on other and more important things. A correct decision, in my opinion. > 1. Is there a way to extract and save in uncompressed ASCII text format the > XFORMS stream or section from the WRITER file package? If one suceeded in > extracting the XFORMS how would it have to be modified for use in other > XFORMS applications? How does one identify a specific instance of XFORMS in > an Open Document file? I am not sure at the moment how the data instance is named in the XML stream (it's in content.xml IIRC), but you should easily be able to check by creating an instance in the data navigator, and searching for its name in the extracted content.xml. For the interoperability with other XForms applications, I am not deeply enough involved with the topic to answer this (and I fear the people who were are not with the project anymore). To my best knowledge, since XForms really only describes things to be *embedded* into host XML dialects, I am uncertain to which extent interoperability is generically possible. > 2. Should there be an option to use the native XFORMS controls; or should > they always be overridden for compatibility with market leading office > suite. Is there some way to balance compatibility with MS Access controls > and using native XFORMS controls(which would facilitate interoperability > with other XForms applications)? Base's form controls are in no way designed for MSA interoperability. (In fact, they were initially created long before there was a Base application, when they were needed for StarOffice's Web Browser functionality). So, the decision to re-use for XForms them had nothing to do with MSA, but simply with what was there. Whether it makes sense to use the XForms syntax for describing controls ... well, one thing is that XForms lacks things which are necessary unless you have a layout manager. That is, XForms does not specify the layout of your controls, this is the task of the renderer. Which means we need to either wait for a new XForms spec, or implement a layout manager for Writer controls. Second, XForms does not even specify the appearance of the controls - a |select| element could be represent by radio buttons or by a list box, this is again up to the renderer. Somewhat contradicting what you expect in an office suite. Again, here we would need to find a solution first. Third, doing this would require an extension to the ODF spec. Not a problem, but simply one more thing on the list. Personally, I think an XSLT exporting an ODF to some other format might be the better way. All that said, it boils down to: XForms in OOo are not actively developed at the moment. Ciao Frank -- - Frank Schönheit, Software Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] - - Sun Microsystems http://www.sun.com/staroffice - - OpenOffice.org Base http://dba.openoffice.org - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
