Switching UI controls based in instance data

All,

I have a general question: Does anyone have experience with enabling/disabling UI controlls based on constantly updated instance data, with no page refreshes? e.g. a drop-down list selection changes all the other UI controls on the page, a clicked link gets replaced with a read-only output from the instance, etc. What is the best approach?

The XForms blog has the following to say (http://www.orbeon.com/blog/2006/08/04/xforms-tip-creating-a-configurable-error-summary/ ):

"We made sure that validity events and the likes are sent as you can expect. The XForms specification is currently silent for example on what you do when a control becomes relevant or non-relevant because its binding to an instance data node appears or disappears after initialization, or when repeating controls are added or removed. In such cases, we have decided to send events so as to make them as useful as possible."

Are there any examples around for this? Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing? What's 'best practice'?

For sample source code, check out a previous posting from me: http://mail-archive.objectweb.org/ops-users/2006-08/msg00418.html

Thanks!

Sincerely,
Henrik Pettersen
Advanced Computation Laboratory
Cancer Research UK




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Henrik,

 > I have a general question: Does anyone have experience with
 > enabling/disabling UI controlls based on constantly updated instance
 > data, with no page refreshes? e.g. a drop-down list selection
 > changes all the other UI controls on the page

Just to clarify: with XForms, you cannot add controls at runtime
(i.e. after the page is loaded), but you can show or hide controls at
will.

 > a clicked link gets replaced with a read-only output from the
 > instance, etc. What is the best approach?

Using xforms:switch or the "relevant" model item property.

 > Are there any examples around for this? Does anyone have experience
 > with this sort of thing? What's 'best practice'?

Using xforms:switch or the "relevant" model item property ;-) For the
latter, you can bind a group to an instance node:

<xforms:group ref="show/my/group">
   ...

If the "show/my/group" instance data node is relevant, the group will
be visible. If not, the group will be invisible. Toggling occurs as
needed, as model item properties are updated. The group can contain
anything you want.

-Erik

--
Orbeon - XForms Everywhere:
http://www.orbeon.com/blog/




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