arbitrarily nested document?

Hello all again,

The reason I'm learning XForms is that I need to provide a user
friendly way to edit and augment an XML document -- and I don't want
to debug AJAX.
XForms sounds perfect.
The problem is, that document can have an arbitrary amount of nesting
and indentation levels.
Imagine something like this:

    <blocks xmlns="">
            <block>
                    <info/>
                    <children>
                            <block>
                                    <info/>
                                    <children>
                                            <block>
                                                    <info/>
                                                    <children/>
                                            </block>
                                    </children>
                            </block>
                            <block>
                                    <info/>
                                    <children/>
                            </block>
                    </children>
            </block>
    </blocks>

I have found only two references to editing hierarchical information:

1) Editing Hierarchical Bookmarks With Firefox XForms Extension:
http://xforms-examples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/10-full-examples/82-hierarchial-bookmarks/bookmarks.xhtml
2) XForms/Outline Editor: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XForms/Outline_Editor

but the first one limits the levels to 2 and the second example
flattens the hierarchy and creates an attribute for the indentation
level.
Both are cheating :)

My question:

Is it in the capabilities of XForms to edit arbitrarily nested XML structures?
Or you must know in advance how many levels of "master-detail" the document has?

(I noticed that there is a tree appearance for select and select1 in
Orbeon, but that's not it, is it?)

Thanks a lot
Jaime


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Jaime,

With XForms 1.1, and in particular with what we support in Orbeon  
Forms, you can edit arbitrarily deep XML. By that, I mean that you can  
arbitrarily modify a data structure represented in XML.

But there is an issue regarding the user interface part of this. At  
the moment, XForms does not support recursively repeating controls  
over data to an infinite extent. Typically, if you have 4 levels of  
nesting, then you must provide 4 levels of xforms:repeat in your  
document.

Some proposals have been made in the past to allow for this, such as  
allowing xforms:repeat to recurse, but so far this hasn't made it into  
XForms or Orbeon Forms.

Now you may be able to build a UI which doesn't require you to  
actually nest XForms controls. Also, you may want to took at the tree  
control, which is able to display structures recursively.

-Erik

On Apr 28, 2008, at 1:35 PM, jbarciela jbarciela wrote:
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http://www.orbeon.com/



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Erik,

Thanks again for your answer

>  Some proposals have been made in the past to allow for this, such as
> allowing xforms:repeat to recurse, but so far this hasn't made it into
> XForms or Orbeon Forms.

Is it a frequently requested feature? I understand you guys are
building an XForms editor with XForms. Don't you miss that feature?

>  Now you may be able to build a UI which doesn't require you to actually
> nest XForms controls.

I guess I'll have to. I was trying to avoid the extra transformation
and the added brittleness.

> Also, you may want to took at the tree control, which
> is able to display structures recursively.

I have grep-ed high and low in Orbeon source but I haven't found how
to use the tree control, or what can be attached to it (can the items
be html fragments?). Do you have a pointer to and example? I assume
that I have to specify what field(s) makes an item a child of another;
somehow. Right?

Jaime


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you can infer some things from
http://www.orbeon.com/ops/xforms-sandbox/sample/tree (look at the source).


>> Also, you may want to took at the tree control, which
>> is able to display structures recursively.
>
> I have grep-ed high and low in Orbeon source but I haven't found how
> to use the tree control, or what can be attached to it (can the items
> be html fragments?). Do you have a pointer to and example? I assume
> that I have to specify what field(s) makes an item a child of another;
> somehow. Right?



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you can infer some things from
http://www.orbeon.com/ops/xforms-sandbox/sample/tree (look at the source).


>> Also, you may want to took at the tree control, which
>> is able to display structures recursively.
>
> I have grep-ed high and low in Orbeon source but I haven't found how
> to use the tree control, or what can be attached to it (can the items
> be html fragments?). Do you have a pointer to and example? I assume
> that I have to specify what field(s) makes an item a child of another;
> somehow. Right?



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>> Some proposals have been made in the past to allow for this, such as
>> allowing xforms:repeat to recurse, but so far this hasn't made it  
>> into
>> XForms or Orbeon Forms.
>
> Is it a frequently requested feature? I understand you guys are
> building an XForms editor with XForms. Don't you miss that feature?

Not so far. Everybody has his pet feature, and the total number of  
those probably totals 1 million ;-) We have to prioritize as we have  
very limited resources.
We have simple samples here:

   http://www.orbeon.com/ops/xforms-sandbox/sample/tree
   http://www.orbeon.com/ops/xforms-sandbox/sample/tree-update

The corresponding files are tree.xhtml and tree-update.xhtml. You  
can't put your own controls on the branches with this tree.

-Erik

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http://www.orbeon.com/



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ah! that's where it was

thanks!


On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 12:34 PM, Erik Bruchez <[hidden email]> wrote:

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thanks Jean Luc for the pointer, it was under my nose


On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Jean Luc <[hidden email]> wrote:

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