Sourcing control names and values from an outside datasource

Fieran,

On Feb 11, 2009, at 10:50 AM, Fieran Mason-Blakley wrote:

We are considering incorporating Orbeon Forms into a product with significant interoperability requirements.  I would like to know if Orbeon forms has a way to access an external data source when naming Controls or assigning Values to Controls.

Could you clarify what you mean by "naming Controls or assigning Values to Controls"?

The value of controls comes from an instance (XML document) which you can retrieve from a service of your own (say REST service). You can get the labels for the controls in the same way, to have those dynamically generated or coming from some external configuration. But I am not sure this answers your question.

Alex
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Orbeon Forms - Web 2.0 Forms, open-source, for the Enterprise
Orbeon's Blog: http://www.orbeon.com/blog/
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On Feb 11, 2009, at 1:28 PM, Fieran Mason-Blakley wrote:

1.  A non technical user wishes to build a form to collect information from a batch of clients.  I use the term batch intentionally as each form may target a different group of clients and this process will likely be a recurring one.
2.  The data collected needs to be labeled with annotation names.
2a.  These names would be, by my understanding the names of the controls in the XForm.
What that means is that if I want to preemptively limit the vocabulary used to name the controls, then I need to allow the user who is building the XForm the option of choosing the control name from a limited set of terms.  Maybe I would use an autocomplete box to acoomplish this which sourced its potential values from an external database.

So if I understand this correctly, you are first building a collection or library of "questions". Then someone builds specific forms by putting together selected questions from the "library". Then finally, yet another person comes in and answers the questions put together in those forms. Is that in-line with what you have in mind?

4.  The form would be submitted and I intend to redirect the data to my own datasource instead of the built in eXist database.

There is no problem with that. You can have the data collected through XForms sorted anywhere you want. All you need to do is write a "service" that does the storage.

5.  The stored data would be mined by an unrelated 4th party ( not the form build user, not the assistant that collects the data, not the client, but yet another party who is unrelated to the oranization ).

And I assume that this would be done with some other technology (outside of the scope of Orbeon Forms).

Alex
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Orbeon Forms - Web 2.0 Forms, open-source, for the Enterprise
Orbeon's Blog: http://www.orbeon.com/blog/
Personal Blog: http://avernet.blogspot.com/
Twitter - http://twitter.com/avernet

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On Feb 11, 2009, at 6:51 PM, Fieran Mason-Blakley wrote:

Person One has some questions they want to ask that are in some non electronic form
Person One uses XForm Builder to render his/her questions
Person Two, an assistant of Person One, assists a client, Person Three, in answering the questions that were conceived by Person One and rendered by Person One using XForm Builder

OK, so this is perfectly in-line with the use case Form Builder was designed for. With Form Builder, you can design a number of form which you can group/organize into "apps" or "modules". Then someone can come in and fill out those forms.

Alex
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Orbeon Forms - Web 2.0 Forms, open-source, for the Enterprise
Orbeon's Blog: http://www.orbeon.com/blog/
Personal Blog: http://avernet.blogspot.com/
Twitter - http://twitter.com/avernet

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On Feb 12, 2009, at 10:48 AM, Fieran Mason-Blakley wrote:

Ok, so the purpose of the tool is in line with my intended goal.  My original question however was whether the naming of the elements can be sourced externally.  Currently so far as I can tell, the naming of the elements and the assigment of values in composite controls is done strictly by free-form text entry.  Is there a high likelyhood that a more dynamic mechanism would be adopted by the project?

And by name of the elements, you are referring to the name of the elements in the instance used to store the data entered by the user, which is produced by Form Builder? Right now, the name of the elements is derived from the ID of the control that you specify when building the form. So you can control the name of the element; the only thing you can't control at this point is the structure of the XML, which is generated for you by Form Builder. In the future, we'd like you to be able to provide your own XML "template" (instance), and provide XPath expression pointing to the element to use for each control. Does this help?

Alex
--
Orbeon Forms - Web 2.0 Forms, open-source, for the Enterprise
Orbeon's Blog: http://www.orbeon.com/blog/
Personal Blog: http://avernet.blogspot.com/
Twitter - http://twitter.com/avernet

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