Re: [Xsltforms-support] file uploads

[Conal T. <con...@gm...>]

On 11 February 2017 at 00:46, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <
cm...@bl...> wrote:

>
> What version of XSLTForms are you using?
>

I am using XSLTForms rev.639 ... my fork of
https://github.com/AlainCouthures/xsltforms

The current draft of XForms 2.0 does define a serialize() function, and
> the snapshot of XSLTForms I downloaded last month from SourceForge
> does have an implementation of it.  (Hmm.  For that matter, so does
> 1.0RC2 — at least, the array XsltForms_xpathCoreFunctions defined
> in xsltforms.js has an entry for serialize.)
>

Argh! How did I miss that? Thanks for the tip! I had been thinking
XSLTForms was XForms 1.1, and working from the XForms 1.1 spec, though I
did see the table of functions and simply missed serialize() even though it
was exactly what I was looking for! D'oh!

I've used serialize() and it's perfect.

You may need to serialize into another instance using xf:setvalue, just
> because
>
XForms isn’t always ready to accept values instead of references to values.
>

This is exactly what I've done. I should be away laughing, now, I think.

>
> And on another note — if you have just spent time figuring out how
> xf:upload
> works out of the box in XSLTForms, and how to modify XSLTForms to make it
> do what you actually needed, could you be persuaded to add a page to the
> XSLTForms wikibook describing what you learned?
>

Yes I will ... first I will need to contribute the xsltforms changes back
to Alain somehow. I have (unwittingly) forked the wrong repository, it
seems, and because I couldn't get the build process going I simply edited
the xsltforms.js file directly, so I have a bit of work to do first. It's
still not a complete implementation of "form-data-post" since it only works
with instance elements whose type is "xsd:anyURI" and not the binary
content types. But still, it's enough I think.

Alain, is it best for you if I fork
https://github.com/AlainCouthures/xphoneforms repository, and make a pull
request?

Once I've contributed the patch to xsltforms.js, I will get onto wikibook
and document the process of using <xf:upload> to upload a binary file, and
the trick of using serialize() to upload XML instances as
multipart/form-data parameters.

If every time a serious user of XSLTForms had trouble making something
> work, we made it a practice to write up what we learned and put it into the
> XSLTForms wikibook, to help the next user, the wikibook would soon be
> much more useful than it has been.  (Even in a purely self-interested way,
> this can pay off.  Every time I come back to using transform() after a long
> period of not thinking about it, I find myself trying to remember how it
> works,
> and so the time I spent writing a page on it in the wikibook a couple of
> years ago has now been paid back two or three times.)
>

I know! I have only just got back to using XForms after a break of about 4
years, so I've been consulting it a lot; it's been a very useful resource.

Conal



-- 
Conal Tuohy
http://conaltuohy.com/
@conal_tuohy
+61-466-324297