Using XForms for interfaces to XML data

XForms is a high-level tool for defining user interfaces to XML data. With a design based on years of experience with the simple forms of HTML, XForms systematically distinguishes between the model (the information structures being edited, in the form of sets of XML documents) and the user interface and its appearance. As an XML vocabulary, XForms is embeddable in arbitrary host document languages; its user interface widgets can easily be represented in different ways for different devices and users. Forms of arbitrarily complex fixed structure can be easily represented in XForms. Mixed content, variable-depth recursion, and structural modifications to the model are more challenging. This introduction to XForms provides an overview of its capabilities and current limits and the prospects for overcoming them.

ProofExpress

For a browser-based XML article proofing system to function well in a journal publishing workflow, it must embody two virtues: It must have a very shallow learning curve, because the majority of users will be encountering it for the first time, and they may have no knowledge whatsoever of XML. It must also have a comprehensive and accurate change-tracking feature that allows editors to accept and reject changes without breaking the XML. A system designed for a publication services company with many publisher-customers must have the additional virtue of being highly customizable to account for wide variations in journal styles and the particular needs of online hosts. To achieve usability, we based ProofExpress on LiveContent Create (formerly Xopus), a browser-based, WYSIWYG XML editor, and designed form-based tools to guide users in the creation of more complex XML structures. Our change-tracking feature employs denormalization of nested elements to granularly expose all edits and a rule engine that protects the structure of the XML by governing the order of acceptance and rejection of edits. XML configuration files control the content of the nodes added by the tools, allowing ProofExpress to accommodate the differences in, for example, reference, citation, and footnote styles used by journals that publish articles in XML that conforms to the JATS 1.0 DTD.

XForms generation: a real world example

INSEE runs a lot of surveys and needs to make them available on different media: paper questionnaires, specialized survey software or web forms. As part of an overall effort of rationalization of its information system, INSEE recently initiated the construction of a central statistical metadata repository and of a generic platform for survey data collection. We describe in this paper a pathfinder operation that draws from these two important projects and aims at automating the generation of web questionnaires from metadata models. We explain the business justification of this approach and the technological choices made, especially the utilization of XForms. The generation process is described in detail and the lessons learned from this operation are depicted.

Customizing a general purpose XML editor: oXygen's authoring environment

oXygen started in 2001 as an IDE for XML and XML related technologies but after some years our users wanted to be able to edit XML documents not only as text, in the source mode, but also in a way that will be non-intimidating for non-technical people. As a result of that, we introduced in 2007 support for visually editing XML documents. The rendering is based on CSS and we allow also custom actions to be defined through configuration or through Java coding, XSLT or XQuery scripts, etc. With CSS extensions we introduced also form based controls and actions directly in the user interface, thus making possible to quickly create interfaces for editing XML documents that completely hide the underlying XML structure and allow people to edit XML without seeing any of the XML markup.

ProX: XML for interfacing with XML for processing XML (and an XForm to go with it)

The process XML or ProX for short was introduced to create an abstraction layer around running XProc pipelines. While XProc is XML, running XProc pipelines using an actual engine involves a lot more, usually batch or shell scripts that configure the engine and whatever inputs and options, etc, that the pipeline defines, which is something of a pain. Offering the resulting configuration options to an end user in a GUI is difficult at best and a nightmare for any conscientious developer. This paper describes an XML-based abstraction layer that defines all those configuration options. The XML is made available to the user so s/he can configure the pipeline and whatever options it has, and save the configured process as an instance that is then converted to a shell script that runs the configured pipeline, greatly simplifying the configuration.

Generating Schema-Aware XML Editors in XForms

From XForms, it is possible to provide simple user interfaces for editing XML documents. From an XSD schema, it is possible to see which elements and attributes may occur in valid documents and in which combinations. The XFGen system brings these together. XFGen builds an XForm from an XSD schema. That XForm can load, edit, and save any XML instance conforming to the schema. XFGen guarantees that every user interaction with the editor will preserve the validity of the instance. XForms makes it easy to edit structurally fixed XML-encoded forms; XFGen’s editors go beyond this simple case to allow arbitrary structural changes to the document.