]> Introduction to XForms for XML users Building interactive XML tools with XForms Española, New Mexico Black Mesa Technologies LLC 2012

No source; created in electronic form.

 Introduction to XForms Introduction to XForms for XML users Rockville, Maryland 8-9 June 2012 &date.last.touched;

This two-day hands-on course introduces XForms as a technology for building special-purpose XML editors with limited functionality and correspondingly simple user interfaces.

XForms is built on the model / view / controller idiom, in which the ‘model’ is a set of XML documents, the ‘view’ is specified using XHTML and XForms controls (or widgets), and the ‘controller’ takes the form of declarative links between controls in the view and elements or attributes in the XML documents. With XForms, projects can develop vocabulary- and task-specific editors which require less training and provide better task-specific support than full XML editors; it is thus easier to allow domain experts to examine and modify XML encoding, and routine tasks can be performed more quickly and reliably.

Materials

Important resources for participants in the course include: Course outline (with links to slides) XForms resources list Sample public data for exercises Initial course announcement (for the record) Preliminary participant-info questionnaire

Topics and syllabus

The course is divided into eight sessions, four to a day:

Introduction

High-level overview of XForms, background, goals and purpose of the XForms spec; Hello, world example

Atomic values and simple structures (1)

A simple form; multiple submit buttons; enumerated values and vocabulary control; conditional relevance; datatypes; validation.

Atomic values and simple structures (2)

Error messages, help, hints; validation beyond datatypes; styling the form; adjusting for alternate XML structures.

Multi-part user interfaces

Coding patterns for tabbed interfaces, wizards, user-selected alternate views (e.g. summary vs. details, novice vs expert, etc.). Multiple instances; dynamic user interfaces.

Homogeneous repetitions

Handling flat lists; paging through records, one record at a time; running off the cliff and how to avoid it. Read-only lists; lists of editable items; see-many, edit-one interfaces.

Read-write repetitions, CRUD operations

Special styling for focus item; two-pane views. Inserting items; initializing new items. Deleting items.

Mixed content, heterogeneous sequences

Dealing with (flat) heterogeneous sequences; dealing with variable-depth sequences. Extensions to XForms: tree editors, general mixed-content editors. Doing without the extensions: targeted editing in mixed content, offloading work to XSLT.

What next? Individual work and/or Q/A

Where do you go from here? Individual work or questions and answers; wrapup.

During the class, students will develop a small XForms application with a multi-part interface, multiple widget types, and the ability to add, modify, and delete records in a set. Students will be encouraged to take their class exercise files with them so that they can continue to work with them after the class.

Prerequisites

Participants should be comfortable editing XML documents and have some knowledge of HTML markup. Familiarity with XPath and XSLT is helpful but not required. Programming experience is not required.

Students may bring their own laptops or may use a classroom machine.

The machine must support wifi networking and have a browser with support for Javascript and XSLT (any reasonably current version of most major browsers will work) as well as software the student can comfortably use for editing XML documents.