| Paul Everitt 2005-08-15, 8:04 pm |
|
Sorry, I forgot to prepend "XForms" on my subject line, to indicate that
I'm asking questions about the XForms support from the XPI nightly builds.
--Paul
Paul Everitt wrote:
>
> Hi all. I have a series of questions in support of building a small
> invoice application, which if I succeed in doing so, I'll try to write
> up a decent tutorial on how I did it.
>
> My questions mostly revolve around which design patterns I should use,
> based on what parts are fairly stable in the nightly builds. I follow
> the status updates here:
>
> http://www.beaufour.dk/blog/
>
> ...quite frequently and find the information exceptionally useful. My
> first attempt at doing this sample app in the nightly XPI 4 weeks ago
> was quite frustrating. This blog helps me get a feeling on which
> direction to go. (As a note, I've tinkered with XUL/chrome/RDF apps for
> a few years.)
>
> I won't go too much into requirements, just enough to start asking
> questions. Imagine a little application to browse, edit, add, and
> delete invoices. For the moment, pretend the information on each
> invoice is very flat and boring: invoice number, title, amount, and a
> vendor from a pre-defined list.
>
> I must admit, I got stuck pretty quickly. :^) I needed some way to
> browse around the existing list of invoices. I could do it in two basic
> ways:
>
> 1) Tree. Use <select> and change the currently-displayed invoice for
> the right event.
>
> 2) VCR-like. Use something like MS Access, where you have:
>
> << < [90____] > >>
>
> Handle each form control similarly to (1).
>
> I found that event handling never worked quite the way I expected it to.
> I tried xforms-select but could never make anything happen. DOMActivate
> didn't work. Even attaching an HTML event via JS didn't produce much
> help (as the model appears quite opaque to the DOM).
>
> Based on the nightlies, what is a stable, good UI approach (select vs. a
> series of <input> form elements) for browsing a series of "records"?
>
> What is the right way to handle an event for that UI approach,
> reflecting it into the model so that another <group> of elements
> automatically changes to a different bound element?
>
> --Paul
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