FormBuilder - can a richer Help Message be created?

I'm trying out Orbeon-CE 3.8.0.

In Form Builder a Help Message can be included for any form element.
However the popup text message is very plain and the structure is lost.

How can I replace the standard Help Message with a rich text format?
Better still .. if possible on clicking "Help" I would like to popup a flash object
embedded an iframe in a div.

I've dug around and can see only seven javascript files in
WEB-INF\resources\apps\xforms-sandbox\samples\

Is this Help Message created by YUI?

Can you point me to where the Help Message is created?

Thanks

The solution is definitely not under the "samples" directory, sorry!

Form Builder doesn't support HTML help at this time.

The XForms engine does. At the XForms level something like this works though:

<xf:label><xf:output mediatype="text/html"
ref="path/to/the/label/text"/></xf:label>

The XForms engine transforms this into simple markup which you can see
with your browser's view source, and the client xforms.js calls YUI to
show the help dialog.

-Erik

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 6:45 AM, DL <[hidden email]> wrote:

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Sorry for the beginner questions ..

So I understand that I should skip FormBuilder to integrate Xforms into external frameworks?

In fact my intended framework is PHP5 and I plan to generate Xforms by PHP5 and then run them on the XForms engine.

Is FormRunner the same as the XForms engine?

Is this a good starting point (integrating with java)?

http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/developer-guide/xforms-with-java-applications

...

My interest is to have a front end system (PHP5 based) which dynamically generates the xml creating the Xforms (by PHP and not JSP) to run on XForms engine.

From a tree structure with several hundred nodes each node in the tree requires one of a set of Xforms to be selected and data for that node submitted to eXist db, and later eXist to be queried for the Xform data.

I need to learn how to communicate between XForms engine and external PHP5 framework.

I read that this has been done with TYPO3.

> Sorry for the beginner questions ..

No problem!

> So I understand that I should skip FormBuilder to integrate Xforms into
> external frameworks?

"Skipping" Form Builder should probably not be based strictly on
whether help can support HTML ;)

If you need a builder than definitely look into Form Builder. If you
don't, then yes, skip.

> In fact my intended framework is PHP5 and I plan to generate Xforms by PHP5
> and then run them on the XForms engine.
>
> Is FormRunner the same as the XForms engine?

See the FAQ for the diffs between Form Builder/Form Runner/XForms engine:

http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/orbeon-forms-faq/faq-orbeon-form-builder

> Is this a good starting point (integrating with java)?
>
> http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/developer-guide/xforms-with-java-applications

For one particular type of integration, yes.
What we did was a proxying front-end for Form Runner:

http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/developer-guide/form-runner/typo3-extension

What it seems like you want to implement is a service that:

* receives XForms from PHP (through HTTP?)
* processes the form through the XForms engine (possibly Form Runner)

The difference with the TYPO3 proxy is that in that case, forms were
not dynamically generated: they were built with Form Builder.

-Erik


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What it seems like you want to implement is a service that:

* receives XForms from PHP (through HTTP?)
* processes the form through the XForms engine (possibly Form Runner)

That is correct.  

I understand now that I will have to interface my external PHP5 apps through a persistence layer.

I see now how to add new apps in "apps" directory.  
I added custom_yuirte to see how that works.

This thread has moved beyond the original posting "HTML format Help" ..
but I've learned a lot and will post other questions in new threads.

Thanks.