How to move from Building in Form Builder to handcoding with Form Runner?

Hi,
I am new to XForms, and have been tasked with investigating how to create a Form containing a table and a number of drop down lists. The Drop down lists are used to populate the table. My idea was to use the XForms Builder to create an initial structure for the form, and then move to hand coding to add those components that the Forms Builder doesn't support directly, such as the table component (and my requirement to have at least six buttons in a line horizontally). I now have a number of questions relating to this:

1) Can Form Runner support elements that are not present in Form Builder, such as a table, or a grid with more than 4 elements horizontally?

2) If Form Runner can do this, how can I move from building my form in Form Builder to editing, testing and running it manually? What I need to do requires more work than I can do by clicking the Advanced->Edit Source button and tweaking details. I have read the Integration Notes and Persistence Layer page several times, but have not been able to work out what I need to do to test my form outside of the Builder context.

My apologies if these are very simple questions, but I have spent over a day and a half trying to figure out point (2) and am still baffled! Thanks in advance,
/Michael

Michael,

Answers below:

> 1) Can Form Runner support elements that are not present in Form Builder,
> such as a table

Yes, Form Runner basically decorates the form created by Form Builder
with its own elements. After that, the form goes through the XForms
engine as usual, and everything supported by the XForms engine should
work.

> , or a grid with more than 4 elements horizontally?

You can do that, although there might be a bit of CSS to adjust as our
CSS only supports up to 4 columns.

> 2) If Form Runner can do this, how can I move from building my form in Form
> Builder to editing, testing and running it manually? What I need to do
> requires more work than I can do by clicking the Advanced->Edit Source
> button and tweaking details. I have read the
> http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/contributor-guide/form-builder-integration-notes
> Integration Notes and Persistence Layer  page several times, but have not
> been able to work out what I need to do to test my form outside of the
> Builder context.

This is actually pretty easy:

* under your RESOURCES directory, create subdirectories
forms/APP_NAME/FORM_NAME/form
* store your form under RESOURCES/forms/APP_NAME/FORM_NAME/form/form.xhtml
* in your properties-local.xml file, add:

<property as="xs:anyURI"
name="oxf.fr.persistence.app.uri.APP_NAME.FORM_NAME.form"
value="/fr/service/resource"/>

Of course replace APP_NAME and FORM_NAME appropriately.

The form should then be read from that location on disk instead of
from the database.

-Erik


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I created the properties-local.xml file and created the directory structure but only forms showing are those in eXist.  Am I missing something else?