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We are creating a business process management solution, which involves creating forms to be used by the process. At the moment we create the forms using xhtml, which is part of a component with a backing bean. I've been asked to investigate to use xforms to design the forms, so that the forms could be created using openoffice.

Openoffice Xforms Designer

In a preliminary investigation, it doesn't seem that openoffice has a way to export in xform format only. I could open the zip of document containing the form, and I could find some tags that ressemble xforms tags, but mixed with a lot of other stuff.

So my first question would be if openoffice would be a viable tool to create the xforms, and how to save them in xml format.

Xforms-Xforms Integration

My second question would be how to interface JSF with XForms. As far as I could see in my investigation, most of xform tools nowadays are based in javascript. Is there some existing api/tool to connect xforms with JSF?

Alternative Xhtml Designer

An alternative solution would be to use a xhtml based form designer, would anyone suggest one that would be simple and easy to use? I thought using jboss tools for designing xhtml, but it isnt too friendly for non techies.

thanks

Emerson
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  • For a form designer, you could look at Orbeon Form Builder. It's open source and web-based, and produces XHTML+XForms+components that you could post-process (e.g. with XSLT) for your own needs. (I am one of the developers of Form Builder so I am obviously introducing a bias here.) – ebruchez Mar 15 '11 at 17:54

1 Answers1

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OpenOffice — I have no personal experience with OpenOffice, but so far have seen a few people who have tried to use the "XForms" produced by OpenOffice outside of OpenOffice, and don't remember seeing anyone getting a lot of success out of it.

JSF — XForms and JSF have a few points in common: they both provide state-full components (called controls in XForms), and if you combine XForms with XBL, you also get the ability to define your own components. Maybe for this reason, I rarely see JSF and XForms being used together. The question is: what type of integration are you looking for? In general XForms integrates through the use of REST/web services. So you typically integrate XForms with another backend technology, and much more rarely with another front-end technology.

Designer — Like @ebruchez, I'd recommend you have a look at Form Builder, which is part of the open source Orbeon Forms. But I'll have to attach the same disclaimer: I do development on Orbeon Forms, and thus my opinion might be biased ;).

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avernet
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  • We will use the forms in a processes management system, which is based on JSF and JBPM. Currently we have a JSF component that takes xhtml files to define the forms. I'm evaluating xforms as it apparently has better support for form editting, but if it will give me more trouble to get XForms and JSF integrated, I would better create some sort of form builder based only on java+js. Maybe could I also use orbeon as a form builder, but that would generate jsf xhtml?? – Emerson Mar 16 '11 at 21:42
  • Orbeon doesn't generate "JSF code". Orbeon Forms is a web app (essentially a servlet), and if you use the Orbeon Form Builder, you also need to use Orbeon Forms at runtime, as the builder generates XForms, which depends on the XForms engine at runtime. – avernet Mar 24 '11 at 19:15