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plans to expose a public API?

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Jean Luc-2
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plans to expose a public API?

Jean Luc-2
Hi Erik & Alex,
 
Do you have any plans to expose a public API for programmatic manipulations of XForms elements on the *server* side? Something one level of abstraction higher than XML manipulation.
 
For instance, in my case, I do a fair bit of processing to an Xform (some examples below) and it would be nice to use Orbeon's intimate understanding of Xforms for some of this processing. Note this is not related to the rendering part, but simply to manipulate an Xform. Much like JDOM which simplified XML processing, an XForm manipulation library would be a welcome aid for developers. It will allow a server-side developer to specify *what*, not *how*.
 
Examples:
 
- (easy one): make a form read-only on the fly (I use that for previewing one). To do that now, several steps are needed: set a model's readonly-appearance attribute to true, the instance's readonly attribute to true and similar operations on the Submit element. It'd be nice to simply have form.setReadOnly(true)
 
- in my case, I have to duplicate certain elements in a form (the user defines a form for capturing 'information about widgets' and then says "I want the form prefilled for widgets A, B and C" - that's a single form). This means to generate elements under <model> on the fly, based on the given template. I'd love to be able to say "take the xml under <model><widgets><widget>; duplicate the empty model two more times then fill in each <widget> with the information from A, B and C, respectively"). I realize not everything here should be done by Orbeon, but a higher level interface than JDOM & XPath would be helpful.
 
If you want a product management perspective, Orbeon would become a server-side development platform as well, not only a rendering and application-level platform. You can have plugins and so on.
 
Thanks,
JL


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Alessandro Vernet
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Re: plans to expose a public API?

Alessandro Vernet
Administrator
Jean Luc,

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Jean Luc <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Do you have any plans to expose a public API for programmatic manipulations
> of XForms elements on the *server* side? Something one level of abstraction
> higher than XML manipulation.
> [...]

The Java API would rather be much lower level compared to using XForms
itself, but  I am wondering (especially based on your second example)
if a component system would not satisfy your requirements. Here are
some of our thoughts in the subject:

https://wiki.objectweb.org/ops/Wiki.jsp?page=XFormsComponents

The solution we explored here is based on XBL. Would this be useful
with the cases you have in mind?

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/


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Jean Luc-2
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Re: Re: plans to expose a public API?

Jean Luc-2
I'm not familiar with XBL so I can't yet form an opinion about it. One
question I'd have is whether this requires a browser or client-side
processing - then it wouldn't work for me.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Alessandro Vernet" <[hidden email]>
To: <[hidden email]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 9:01 PM
Subject: [ops-users] Re: plans to expose a public API?


> Jean Luc,
>
> On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Jean Luc <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> Do you have any plans to expose a public API for programmatic
>> manipulations
>> of XForms elements on the *server* side? Something one level of
>> abstraction
>> higher than XML manipulation.
>> [...]
>
> The Java API would rather be much lower level compared to using XForms
> itself, but  I am wondering (especially based on your second example)
> if a component system would not satisfy your requirements. Here are
> some of our thoughts in the subject:
>
> https://wiki.objectweb.org/ops/Wiki.jsp?page=XFormsComponents
>
> The solution we explored here is based on XBL. Would this be useful
> with the cases you have in mind?
>
> 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/
>

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


>
> --
> You receive this message as a subscriber of the [hidden email] mailing
> list.
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>



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Erik Bruchez
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Re: Re: Re: plans to expose a public API?

Erik Bruchez
Administrator
No, there wouldn't be any client-side processing with the component  
system we have in mind.

-Erik

On Mar 20, 2008, at 10:35 AM, Jean Luc wrote:

> I'm not familiar with XBL so I can't yet form an opinion about it.  
> One question I'd have is whether this requires a browser or client-
> side processing - then it wouldn't work for me.
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alessandro Vernet" <[hidden email]
> >
> To: <[hidden email]>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 9:01 PM
> Subject: [ops-users] Re: plans to expose a public API?
>
>
>> Jean Luc,
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Jean Luc <[hidden email]>  
>> wrote:
>>> Do you have any plans to expose a public API for programmatic  
>>> manipulations
>>> of XForms elements on the *server* side? Something one level of  
>>> abstraction
>>> higher than XML manipulation.
>>> [...]
>>
>> The Java API would rather be much lower level compared to using  
>> XForms
>> itself, but  I am wondering (especially based on your second example)
>> if a component system would not satisfy your requirements. Here are
>> some of our thoughts in the subject:
>>
>> https://wiki.objectweb.org/ops/Wiki.jsp?page=XFormsComponents
>>
>> The solution we explored here is based on XBL. Would this be useful
>> with the cases you have in mind?
>>
>> 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/
--
Orbeon Forms - Web Forms for the Enterprise Done the Right Way
http://www.orbeon.com/



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