Form builder's autocomplete and initial instance

Hi!

I am playing around with the form builder's autocomplete from latest trunk. I am using the resource mode that seems to work very great! Nevertheless, there seems to be an issue with setting the value of the autocomplete field from an initial instance: When POSTing an initial instance, all fields except the autocomplete is filled with the initial data. Does somebody know any possible reason for this?

Thank you!

Hi Lacco,

This is a tricky one with the autocomplete. It is a selection control,
so each item has a label and value. The value is the one stored in the
instance, and the label is what is displayed to users. The question
is: how do you get the label from the value? If we have the full
itemset (i.e. the autocomplete is in static mode), then the
autocomplete can do this automatically. Otherwise, you'll have to
write some code to figure out the label, and dispatch fr-set-label to
the autocomplete.

http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/developer-guide/xbl-components/autocomplete#TOC-Setting-the-content-of-the-text-fie

To make this easier, maybe we should extend the autocomplete resource
mode, so you configure it with another service that takes a value as a
request parameter and returns the label. The  the autocomplete could
call that service automatically on form load to get the label for a
value stored in the instance.

Alex

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 6:06 AM, lacco <[hidden email]> wrote:

--
Orbeon Forms - Web forms, open-source, for the Enterprise -
http://www.orbeon.com/
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/avernet


--
You receive this message as a subscriber of the [hidden email] mailing list.
To unsubscribe: mailto:[hidden email]
For general help: mailto:[hidden email]?subject=help
OW2 mailing lists service home page: http://www.ow2.org/wws

Hi Alex,

I played around with the "Setting by label" alternative, but didn't come up with a final solution. I would like to add a small snippet to autocomplete.xbl component that takes the value and post it to the server to determine the label. I would like to get the following working:

<xforms:dispatch ev:event="DOMActivate" targetid="my-autocomplete-control" name="fr-set-label">
  <xxforms:context name="label" select="xxforms:bind('my-autocomplete-bind')"/>
</xforms:dispatch>

Should this snippet work as expected, where do I have to put it when editing the source code via form builder? How do I integrate it into autcomplete.xpl, how do I get targetid and the binding dynamically?

Thank you!

Hi Lacco,

I don't see a way to support this by adding something that would be
simple to the XBL. You could imagine adding something to your form.
But for this, you would need to:

1. Implement a service that returns the label for a given value.
2. Add a <xforms:submission> pointing to that service.
3. Add instance(s) for the input/output to the service.
4. On xforms-model-construct-done or xforms-ready, call the service,
and send the label to the autocomplete with fr-set-label.

This all sounds rather complicated, and I think it would be better to
implement this at the autocomplete level. I added a [LIMITATION]
paragraph in the section pointed to by the link below, so we don't
forget about all this:

http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/developer-guide/xbl-components/autocomplete?pli=1#TOC-Resource

Alex

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 1:58 AM, lacco <[hidden email]> wrote:

--
Orbeon Forms - Web forms, open-source, for the Enterprise -
http://www.orbeon.com/
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/avernet


--
You receive this message as a subscriber of the [hidden email] mailing list.
To unsubscribe: mailto:[hidden email]
For general help: mailto:[hidden email]?subject=help
OW2 mailing lists service home page: http://www.ow2.org/wws

Thanks for your answer. So the new autocomplete xbl won't be helpful for me, I am going back to "conventional" select boxes with loading the data when the form loads. I would be glad to see such enhancements to the autocomplete xbl, thank you!

Hi, I really need to work this out. I will try the suggestion you made here and on an older thread here : http://orbeon-forms-ops-users.24843.n4.nabble.com/Setting-content-of-text-field-in-fr-autocomplete-td2216656.html

If it works, I will try to implement it at XBL level.

But I might need more help…

Thanks!

Vincent

That would be really great, I am definitely interested! If I can help you with my very little Orbeon knowledge, leave a message!

Vincent, Lacco,

This limitation has now been lifted. See:

http://blog.orbeon.com/2012/03/autocomplete-gets-new-labelref.html

This is implemented in nighty builds.

Alex

Vincent, Lacco,

This limitation has now been lifted. See:

http://blog.orbeon.com/2012/03/autocomplete-gets-new-labelref.html

This is implemented in nighty builds.

Alex

Thanks a bunch!