ClarkePeter’s Weblog

This is probably not interesting to anyone but me, but I’m obviously having a lot of fun finding out what I can do with xforms. As I’ve mentioned before, there might be better ways to do these things, and I wish I had the time to learn them all. So here’s a new workaround of mine.

So I have an xforms whose instance has a list of file names. I put them in an xf:select1 with xf:itemset so that the user could choose a file for viewing in the browser. Problem is, I don’t know how to do an xf:load from an instance value that is within the same xthml page as the xf:load). I know how to do an xf:load if i have an absolute url (e.g. <xf:load resource=”http://yada.com” show=”new” ev:event=”xforms-select> ) That’s what I’d like to have done, was put the load inside the xf:select1 with an “xforms-select” event and had an immediate load. I tried <xf:load ref=”//fileToLoad” … etc. but that didn’t work. I’m weak on Xpath. I’m sure there’s an xpath expression out there that would get the job done. So, in the meantime, here’s my work around.

After the user makes his selection and hits a view button it will activate the submission to a viewForm.php file (the submitting xforms is fileManager.php). So viewForm.php file will get the file name from the xml instance like so:

if (!isset($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA))
$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = file_get_contents(“php://input”);
/* xmlSTR2xmlAssocARR() is my user-defined function; this function loads an xml file into an associative array. –see my Parsing without the DOM article for the code. */ $showFormAARR=xmlSTR2xmlAssocARR($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);
$showFormSTR=”$showFormAARR[viewFile].xhtml”;
//here I have read in the filename and added the file extension and put them into a string variable

Now that I’ve got the file name, I’ll load the form using xfload: resource=”Forms/$showFormSTR”, I can do this because my xhtml+xforms is wrapped in a php file.

But the fun part is that in the model, I’ll do an xf:load with event “xforms-ready”. In fact I’ll have two loads with event “xforms-ready”, one as a new tab/window (show=”new”), and one as a replace (show=”replace”). The new page is the target xhtml that was selected to be viewed, and the replace page is the submitting page. The net effect is that the submitting page will reload and the page-to-view will show in it’s own window/tab (however, Firefox will block the “new” page as a pop-up, so you’ll have to click “allow popup from this site” or whatever it asks you.) The user will never really know that he left the submitting page, it’ll appear as if only the new page opened. So, that’s it. Here’s the code.

<?php
header("Content-type: application/xhtml+xml");

include("fnGeneric.php");

if (!isset($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA))
   $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = file_get_contents("php://input");

$showFormAARR=xmlSTR2xmlAssocARR($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);
$showFormSTR="$showFormAARR[viewFile].xhtml";

$page=<<<STR
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="Forms/zstyle.css" type="text/css"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="Forms/zstylexf.css" type="text/css"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="Forms/zstylecr.css" type="text/css"?>
<h:html
 xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
 xmlns:ev="http://www.w3.org/2001/xml-events"
 xmlns:xf="http://www.w3.org/2002/xforms"
 xmlns:cr="http://www.cr.com/2007/markup">

<h:head>

<h:title>
   View Form
</h:title>

<xf:model>
<instance>
   <data xmlns="">
     <viewFile/>
   </data>
</instance>

   <xf:action ev:event="xforms-ready">
     <xf:load resource="Forms/$showFormSTR" show="new"/>
     <xf:load resource="fileManager.php" show="replace"/>
   </xf:action>
</xf:model>

</h:head>

<h:body>
   loading page.....
</h:body>
</h:html>
STR;

echo $page;
?>