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What's the "controller" in the XForms Model-View-Controller approach?

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Roger Costello

What's the "controller" in the XForms Model-View-Controller approach?

Hi Folks,

A bit embarrassed to ask, but ...

The Orbeon Forms tutorial says: "XForms follows a Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach"

The model is embedded in the XHTML <head> element.

The view is embedded in the XHTML <body> element.

What's the "controller" part? Are the controls (text box, combo box, etc) the controller part? Then what's the view part?

/Roger

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Hank Ratzesberger

Re: What's the "controller" in the XForms Model-View-Controller approach?

Hi Roger,

In Orbeon Forms, this would be the page-flow controller and
page-flow.xml which it uses to decide how to respond to http
requests (GET, PUT, POST...).

So, there is a separation between the data part and how it
is presented. The view part could as well be a pdf file,
but the page-flow it is assumed that the view attribute is
an xhtml file.

I guess you could say there are two sources of the model part,
the instances you declare in the XForms model element, but in
the page-flow it is an xpl file with an output, an xpl file
that returns an xml document.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_view_controller

--Hank

On Dec 2, 2008, at 9:53 AM, Costello, Roger L. wrote:

>
> Hi Folks,
>
> A bit embarrassed to ask, but ...
>
> The Orbeon Forms tutorial says: "XForms follows a Model-View-
> Controller (MVC) approach"
>
> The model is embedded in the XHTML <head> element.
>
> The view is embedded in the XHTML <body> element.
>
> What's the "controller" part? Are the controls (text box, combo
> box, etc) the controller part? Then what's the view part?
>
> /Roger
> --
> You receive this message as a subscriber of the [hidden email]
> mailing list.
> To unsubscribe: mailto:[hidden email]
> For general help: mailto:[hidden email]?subject=help
> OW2 mailing lists service home page: http://www.ow2.org/wws

Hank Ratzesberger
NEES@UCSB
Institute for Crustal Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara
805-893-8042

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Erik Bruchez

Re: What's the "controller" in the XForms Model-View-Controller approach?

Administrator

In reply to this post by Roger Costello

A double response:

* As Hank says, there is the Orbeon Page Flow Controler. That is the
Orbeon Forms main controller, which defines pages, and connects page
models and page views written in XPL, XSLT, or static files. This part
is independent of XForms.

* In addition, XForms itself has an MVC architecture. Now what is the
controller in XForms? It is a matter of debate, but the XForms 1.1
spec thinks it includes the set of actions offered by XForms: "an
imperative controller for orchestrating data manipulations,
interactions between the model and view layers, and data
submissions." [1] My view was that the controller was a more abstract
notion in XForms, the part of the XForms engine that puts everything
together. But the XForms Working Group disagreed with that ;-)

-Erik

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms11/

On Dec 2, 2008, at 6:53 PM, Costello, Roger L. wrote:

>
> Hi Folks,
>
> A bit embarrassed to ask, but ...
>
> The Orbeon Forms tutorial says: "XForms follows a Model-View-
> Controller (MVC) approach"
>
> The model is embedded in the XHTML <head> element.
>
> The view is embedded in the XHTML <body> element.
>
> What's the "controller" part? Are the controls (text box, combo box,
> etc) the controller part? Then what's the view part?
>
> /Roger
> --
> You receive this message as a subscriber of the [hidden email]
> mailing list.
> To unsubscribe: mailto:[hidden email]
> For general help: mailto:[hidden email]?subject=help
> OW2 mailing lists service home page: http://www.ow2.org/wws

--
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http://www.orbeon.com/

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