DESIGN OF A NEW LANGUAGE BASED ON XFORMS + XFDL AND CONVERSION TO XFDL

Abstract

XForms is a W3C Forms standard that separates purpose from the presentation. The W3C XForms recommendation specifies 3 parts – model, view and control. XForms gives a way to specify data, the calculations and validations on the data in a declarative way. XML is used to specify data. For calculations, XForms provides several functions of its own and borrow functions form XPath as well. This enables us to write huge real world forms without the need of scripting. This makes coding forms much simpler than it is today. Though XForms is simple, it still contains some code which the form designer cannot easily relate to. In this thesis, we have tried to simplify various XForms tags. XForms provides a device-independent view part which can be combined with any presentation option. XFDL (eXtensible Forms Description Language), developed as a simpler presentation language for business forms, has graduated to adopt XForms to represent data, calculations and validations. That is, it provides a g...