[Exist-development] betterFORM integration issues

[Joern T. <joe...@go...>]

Hi James et all,

you might wonder why we still have not added our changes to trunk.

Here is a list of open issues and questions which we found during more
thorough testing:

1. When betterFORM is installed the admin.xql page breaks and shows an
error when logging in or out and when clicking 'Examples Setup'.
Probably other links on this page are also affected. We debugged that
thing and found out that the reason is at admin.xql line 106 where an
empty XForms model is added to the page but we could not see that this
is used in any way. Is that probably remaining from an attempt to use
XForms for the admin pages? Anyway this leads to our XFormsFilter
becoming active and trying to process that page which then fails.
Simply removing that empty model fixes the problem and the pages work
again. If for any reason the removing of that empty model is not
wanted let us know and we can set a header to suppress XForms
processing for that page.

2. Is there any plan for a generic error-page? We have one that is
implemented in xquery but that's specific for our needs (Though it
should not be hard to adapt for the more generic case) and is
configured via the standard <error-page> element in web.xml. This
works for our eXist / betterFORM bundling but of course is not
appropriate for integration in eXist as its now triggered for every
error occuring in eXist.

We can try to work around this and use a redirect in our XFormsFilter
but i think i would be no fault to support the standard mechanism (via
<error-page>). Can anyone comment on this?

3. We have added ourselves to the setup.xqm which we found easier to
manage for us to install our sample application. We will comment out
the relevant section in that file for James to review it. It works for
us and we have tested it but double-checking would be good. Once you
found it's ok you can remove the comments and activate it.

Besides issue 2 we are ready for commit - we will look into this now
and see that we can provide a less intrusive solution until a final
decision has been made.