Thursday, August 31, 2006

XSL Client implmentation

I have uploaded two example XML documents using stylesheets to provide a GUI. Notes:

- While these are able to draw a GUI fine, when submitting I need a way to convert the form variables into an XML document to submit to the server (since the server accepts XML instances), this is difficult to do client side and easier with a server in Java (still it means duplication of efforts if the server is expecting XML instances). With this in mind an HTML client is perhaps not suitable for a client-server architecture communicating with XML instances.

- The server needs to read either the form variables (and process to XML) or read an XML instance, then redirect the client by issuing it with the appropriate XML document, e.g. sending the client a "searchResults.xml" document after the client issues a "search.xml" document (or form values) to the server.

- The stylesheets are hard coded into any XML instance so that the client knows which stylesheet to use for which instance.

Just open up any of the XML documents in a web browser to see how they display...

Also:
- I used Nathans XSD documents from svn
- I put these into /trunk/xslclient...
- Download all files in /xslclient to a folder on your PC before opening the XML documents (the paths to the stylesheets are relative and wont work if you open them from the webserver).

Update:
- I just added "submit.xml" which is meant to submit a new book to the server. Effectively this is the same as "search.xml" but has the server do something different with the XML instance.

- I just realised that the sending of XML (as opposed to form variables) is part of what AJAX does ... so yeh a client done in HTML is viable and can be finished by implementing AJAX to send the XML instances.

1 Comments:

At Sat Sept 02, 09:26:00 pm 2006, Blogger Aaron Bishell said...

I have had trouble getting XForms working, I agree it seems cool but the software support is fairly average. I can't get a plugin for my version of Firefox and the two pieces of software I downloaded for IE don't work.

Im currently using this JavaScript preprocessor to get to get it working. Will work on this over the break.

Have put all my updated files into /trunk/XMLDAD_WebService/resources

 

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