[jbpm-dev] [Design of JBoss jBPM] - Re: oryx and jbpm

[kukeltje]

"tom.baeyens at jboss.com" wrote : 
  | "eikish" wrote : It seems that developers are mostly creating visual XForms syntax editors but not form editors that use XForms underneath if you know what I mean....
  |   | 
  | 
  | i don't and i would like to know.  can you explain that a bit more ?
  | 

I think what he means is the following (correct me if I'm wrong) 

XForms is xhtml, meaning that you have the full set of html elements and css available to design a form. Tables, divs, you name it and it is available. Within this xhtml, there are specific xforms elements (namespaces again :-)) for the behaviour of the form (e.g. is an element from the original xsd conditionally required or not) and there are elements for e.g. input (types), label, grouping etc... If you just look at these xforms elements and display them in a really rudimentary way (like oryx does), you ignore all the html, css etc... That is why they almost look the same in the browser in the lower screenshout, it is a realy simple form. This way you are in fact doing nothing more then semi visually editing the syntax of the xform.

Most you can do is re-order some elements visiually by dragging and dropping besides editing properties of elements like you can in the gpd. It's better then nothing and it is a start, but it is not really desiging forms. Dragging and dropping in an xml tree would be comparable one customer told me. Not quite, but he meant to indicate the real benefits.  I wanted to look into extending the Oryx editor, but what I want would take way to much time and so I currently go for editing the xhtml forms myself in the JBoss Tools html editor  and in the same time look into making VPE templates for the xforms input elements. 

The Orbeon editor goes further, and is way more usable, but is tied to orbeon.



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