Hi guys,
to add my 2cents:
Michael, maybe it helps you to pick up the notion of "use case" as it
serves us as a good scale of what the scope of an XForms might be. From
my POV and I think from the chiba POV, too, an XForm matches one use
case. That means, that one enclosed flow of (user inter-)actions is
executed with the final result of some change of state in the system. A
use case never relies directly on other use cases, with the exceptions
of includes and extension - which should be used sparsly. From that UML
derived view chaining forms and even sharing state between them is
considered bad doing.
A far as processing between single steps of the use case (which would
match an Xforms from your POV) is concerned, XForms allows you to handle
that by using either the calculators or validators and even better to
send requests to the back end system by using a submission. If you need
some new data from the server for the next use case step, you can look
at an submission as an "rpc" style call, that retrieves that data and
fills some prepared instance in the Xforms model. That doesn't have to
be the end of the Xforms / use case. The difference is that the complete
use case logic and dialogs are all conceiled in one XForms. That is more
elegant, cleaner and last not least much less error prone, since single
forms in web applications tend to blur the context in which they are
designed and can cause a lot of head ache if the system gets complex.
I think it is a big mistake to see XForms "just" as another version of
HTML forms, that are embedded in a single web page. So if you design
your applications, model user interaction as use cases and map each one
to an XForms should bring you onto the right track.
:olli
--
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oliver charlet
software development
11-041 Olsztyn, Poland
oliver.charlet-FQhKI8MWrEo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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