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Generate a form from an XSD Schema

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hokkos

Generate a form from an XSD Schema

Hi,
is it possible to generate automatically a form from an XSD schema ?
I see there is an Add Schema in an option of the form builder tool but it seems only limited to simple type validation with some inputs.

If there is no such functionality, is there a way to load an xform to be executed by the form runner ? Because the xform engine seems less aesthetic.

Thanks.

Erik Bruchez

Re: Generate a form from an XSD Schema

Administrator

Simple answer: no and no.

Longer answer:

1. That would be nice, and in fact we have hoped to have this for a long time, but it hasn't materialized yet.

2. This would be possible if you can manage to convert your plain XForms to something compatible with what Form Runner expects, including: instance names, sections, grids, etc. In short something that looks like this template:

https://github.com/orbeon/orbeon-forms/blob/master/src/resources/forms/orbeon/builder/form/template.xml

or the sample form definitions here:

https://github.com/orbeon/orbeon-forms/tree/master/data/orbeon/fr/orbeon

-Erik

hokkos

Re: Generate a form from an XSD Schema

Have you ever looked the Alfresco Schema2XForms tool ?

Erik Bruchez

Re: Generate a form from an XSD Schema

Administrator

I have to say that we haven't. Does anybody have experience with it?

-Erik

Eric van der Vlist

Re: Generate a form from an XSD Schema

Le vendredi 07 mars 2014 à 11:12 -0800, Erik Bruchez a écrit :
> I have to say that we haven't. Does anybody have experience with it?

There is a number of projects that does so, see for instance
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wsdl2xforms/ which has been used on a
large scale with Orbeon Forms in Estonia.

The criticism we can do to this approach is that designing a schema
isn't the same thing as designing a form: fields must often be presented
in a different order than they appear in the schema (or be omitted) and
you may also want to implement several different forms for a single
schema.

For these reasons you may prefer to generate forms from higher level
models than schemas.

Concerning Form Runner, the structure of the form makes it quite easy to
generate forms.

We have presented a project that does this kind of things at Balisage
last year, see
http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol11/html/Cotton01/BalisageVol11-Cotton01.html

Hope this helps,

Eric

> -Erik
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Ethan Gruber

Re: Generate a form from an XSD Schema

In reply to this post by hokkos

I plan to play around with schematron or a combination of schematron and an RDF ontology to generate a form. Someone mentioned it on the list a few years ago, but I don't know if it moved forward. If I'm moderately successful implementing schematron, I'll report back.

I think Eric's point is valid: if you could dynamically generate a form from XSD, would that form be user-friendly? I think you have to carefully balance usability with automation.

Ethan

On Friday, March 7, 2014 12:00:25 PM UTC-5, Arnaud M wrote:

Have you ever looked the Alfresco Schema2XForms
<<a href="https://svn.alfresco.com/repos/alfresco-open-mirror/alfresco/HEAD/root/projects/web-client/source/java/org/alfresco/web/forms/xforms/Schema2XForms.java" target="_blank" onmousedown="this.href='https://www.google.com/url?q\75https%3A%2F%2Fsvn.alfresco.com%2Frepos%2Falfresco-open-mirror%2Falfresco%2FHEAD%2Froot%2Fprojects%2Fweb-client%2Fsource%2Fjava%2Forg%2Falfresco%2Fweb%2Fforms%2Fxforms%2FSchema2XForms.java\46sa\75D\46sntz\0751\46usg\75AFQjCNFi_q1M9JF8sD33KqiDQZY2rDboGg';return true;" onclick="this.href='https://www.google.com/url?q\75https%3A%2F%2Fsvn.alfresco.com%2Frepos%2Falfresco-open-mirror%2Falfresco%2FHEAD%2Froot%2Fprojects%2Fweb-client%2Fsource%2Fjava%2Forg%2Falfresco%2Fweb%2Fforms%2Fxforms%2FSchema2XForms.java\46sa\75D\46sntz\0751\46usg\75AFQjCNFi_q1M9JF8sD33KqiDQZY2rDboGg';return true;">https://svn.alfresco.com/repos/alfresco-open-mirror/alfresco/HEAD/root/projects/web-client/source/java/org/alfresco/web/forms/xforms/Schema2XForms.java>
tool ?

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Erik Bruchez

Re: Generate a form from an XSD Schema

Administrator

I don't think the form would be user-friendly at all. But that in itself doesn't invalidate the idea: the form generated can be a starting point. This makes sense especially with Form Builder.

-Erik