Re: [Exist-development] betterFORM integration issues

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

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Dan McCreary <dan...@gm...> wrote:
> Hello Joern,
>
> First of all, we are very much looking forward to continue testing out your
> work!  This integration point could be a real leap for people creating XRX
> apps.  This is an area that could make is much easier for new users to
> create robust XRX apps and will get us all to think about moving eXist from
> a database server to an web application server where we can build libraries
> of reusable web apps.

We very much hope that we can contribute to this development. Tightly
integrating with eXist is also a major step for us - XForms and eXist
can do so much more than both alone. One of our next steps will be to
provide some docs, extend our sample app with role-based views and
show more advanced client-side controls like a data grid with paging,
sorting and column resizing (already works but we are still in the
process of migrating to latest Dojo).

Further we'd like to develop an xrx quickstart form that takes a few
inputs from the user and creates the barebones of a complete XRX app
(creating all necessary standard collections and resources as proposed
by your XRX beginner paper). Later on it would be nice to have a CRUDS
generator form to even get more quickly to a working app. We hope that
the community will kick in with this as our resources are limited and
we have to look after all the new stuff that comes up in XForms.

Joern
>
>> Is there any plan for a generic error-page?
> This is a wonderful idea!  If all errors were returned to the XForms (and
> AJAX) clients is a consistent XML format we could create a central set of
> tools to process and view the errors.  Integrating server-side checks upon a
> save (Schema validation, Schematron etc.) could be done in a uniform way and
> we could create shared XQuery modules to do this.  It is too bad that
> neither the XForms or the XQuery specs addressed this issue.  Let me know if
> you would like any help with this aspect of your work.
>
> - Dan
>
> On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 5:11 AM, Joern Turner <joe...@go...>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Dan McCreary
> Semantic Solutions Architect
> office: (952) 931-9198
> cell: (612) 986-1552
>