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Semi-Automatic Transformation of an XML Schema to XForms

Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2011

Abstract

The capabilities of classic web forms written purely in HTML become these days insufficient. The missing type control, no support for validation or tight coupling of data and presentation layers limit their usage.

So the XForms technology, the new generation forms based completely on the well-known XML format, was created. It includes all mentioned features and no other scripting language is needed.

There are several studies of how to automate the process of creating XForms if there exists a schema against which the form will be validated. This paper presents a new method of semi-automatic transformation from the XML Schema to XForms using a simple subset of the XHTML as the host language for generated forms.

The proposed algorithm is based on traversing the input XML schema and generating the XForms form in two phases. We prove the feasibility of this concept with the implemented XForms editor.