ClarkePeter’s Weblog

We pretty much have everything in place to set up our Delete Files option. But now that we’re sure Mozilla’s itemset is working, we’re going to use a select control with itemset rather than the approach we took in Directory List Xforms and PHP pt. 1 where we listed the files in our directory using xf:input (with a boolean type, which resulted in the same effect as a select element).

Now, however, it should all be much simpler with itemset.

Here’s another look at the xml file structure

<fileManager>

<viewFile>Testing</viewFile>
<deleteFiles/>

<fileList type="multi">

   <file text="fakeEmtpyaad232" full="./Forms/fakeEmtpyaad232.xhtml" select="false"/>
   <file text="fakeEmtye" full="./Forms/fakeEmtye.xhtml" select="false"/>
   <file text="fakeEmtyef" full="./Forms/fakeEmtyef.xhtml" select="false"/>
   <file text="xfakeEmptyxxxxxxx" full="./Forms/xfakeEmptyxxxxxxx.xhtml" select="false"/>

</fileList>

</fileManager>

Here’s an image:

We’ll also have a handy little second chance button. Like so:

What’s nice about the second chance button is that it’s all xforms and client-side; lightning fast, no scripting. To know how to do this go to To submit or not?

Now for the “delete files” code, here’s the core of it:

    <xf:select ref="deleteFiles" appearance="full" >

        <h:span style="color:maroon; font-size:125%;">
               <xf:label >Select the forms to delete: </xf:label>
        </h:span>

        <xf:itemset nodeset="//file">
          <xf:value ref="@full" />
          <xf:label ref="@text" />
        </xf:itemset>

    </xf:select>

And that’s pretty much it.

Notice one thing we did NOT add and that is an “All Files Selected” option. That would be a pretty dangerous option for our poor user who may have been up all night making last minute final exams or what have you .. and then, *poof* –so we’ll just let our user select them one at a time even if there are hundreds of them.

One thing we could do, however, if you suspect your user will be working with a lot of files, is to set the xf:select appearance to appearance=”compact” rather than “full.” In this mode, the user will be allowed to use the control and shift keys just like in a regular directory to select several files at once.
You’ll need to move your label around, of course. See below:

next, we’ll see what we need to do with the selected files when our PHP file recieves the submitted xml data.

addendum 09/12/07: I’ve actually decided to go with “compact” since the current rendering on a pc tends to act like a regular file directory (using select and ctl keys for multi-selections). In my application, I lengthened the menu box to height:45ex; so that 20 or so files will show at a time.