Please suggest designing this application

We have a web application and we are planning to use xforms for some of the editing of xml data stored in a database.
We would like to send some parameters when a user clicks on a link ,retrive some xml data from database and allow users to edit it.
My understanding is we should use XML Pipelines to retrieve the data and pass the data to xforms to view it and pass actionssuch as save back to page flow to save data to database.
Is this correct ? How can i pass parameters to page flow?
I am new to this area.Please help with my solution and let me know if the overall picture looks fine to gurus.

Thanks

Hi,

> My understanding is we should use XML Pipelines to retrieve the data and
> pass the data to xforms to view it and pass actionssuch as save back to page
> flow to save data to database.
> Is this correct ? How can i pass parameters to page flow?

First of all, there's a great tutorial [1] desribing the first steps.

The work to retrieve the data is done by "Processors" (there are different
processors for different tasks, for example the xmldb processor [2] to query a
xml database). The task of the XML Pipelone is to invoke the processors to do
something with the xml data. So the xml pipeline isn't directly responsible,
e.g., to retrieve the data from a database, but to invoke the appropriate
processor to fulfil this task. Pipelines are described here: [3].

Passing parameters: i think, this is well illustrated in the tutorial. You will
have to submit a xml document that contains, for example, the id of a certain
document inside the xml database. The page flow calls a xpl pipeline depending
on your submission and passes the submitted xml doc. The pipeline will call a
processor to issue a query based on the input xml data. The input xml has to be
transformed (with xslt, for example) into a query appropriate to the database.
If you use exist-db, this could be XQuery. The result takes its way back to the
pipeline and to the xforms page defined in the page flow.

With a setup as described, the page flow doesn't care of the content of the
submitted data. There is a way to do navigation using the page-flow depending on
the content of the submittet xml data as described here [4], but personally, i
use the page-flow without any conditions and implement all decisions that depend
on the content of the document in the pipelines.

HTH
florian

[1] http://www.orbeon.com/ops/doc/intro-tutorial
[2] http://www.orbeon.com/ops/doc/processors-xmldb
[3] http://www.orbeon.com/ops/doc/reference-xpl-pipelines
[4] http://www.orbeon.com/ops/doc/reference-page-flow#page-navigation




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You may not have to use an XML pipeline if your database supports a  
REST API. The Government Forms and the XForms Bookcast tutorial show  
how you can directly access the eXist database, for example.

If you can't directly talk to an XML database, then you can write a  
translation layer as middleware. This can be implemented with XML  
pipelines, but it doesn't have to: you could write the service in  
Java, Ruby, Perl, or any technology you like.

-Erik

On Nov 23, 2007, at 10:19 AM, xmlguy wrote:
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