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Posted to modperl@perl.apache.org by Dmitry Beransky <db...@ucsd.edu> on 2000/07/31 20:54:06 UTC

XForms & ASP (was: The Template Toolkit )

I'm still pretty vague on where I want to go with this myself :).  Just 
bits and pieces of ideas.  Last night I tried to put something together, 
though, and ran into a strange problem which I can't figure out how to 
solve.  Perhaps, you may have a suggestion, Joshua (the xform markup's 
taken directly from w3c's side):

Here's my sample ASP file:

<%@language="PerlScript"%>
<%
    use XML::DOM;
    use XML::XPath;
    my ($xform,$xform_xpath);
%>
<html>
<head>
<xform xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/xforms"
   action="http://www.my.com/cgi-bin/receiver.pl"
   method="postXML"
   id="po_xform">
   <model>
     <group name="purchaseOrder">
       <group name="shipTo">
         <string name="name"/>
         <string name="street"/>
         <string name="city"/>
         <string name="state"/>
         <string name="zip">
           <mask>ddddd</mask>
         </string>
       </group>
     </group>
   </model>
</xform>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Form</h1>

    <form id="po_xform"/>
    <form/>
</body>
</html>

<%
sub form
{
}

sub xform
{
    my ($attributes, $body) = @_;
    my $parser = new XML::DOM::Parser;

    $body =~ s/\n//mgs;
    $body = "<xform>$body</xform>";
    $Response->Write($body );
}
%>

when I run this, I get the following error:

[Mon Jul 31 10:45:53 2000] (eval 76): String found where operator expected at
(eval 76) line 50, at end of line
[Mon Jul 31 10:45:53 2000] (eval 76):   (Missing operator before ?)
[Mon Jul 31 10:45:53 2000] [error] [asp] [605] [error] [Mon Jul 31 10:45:53 20
00] (eval 76): Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at (eval 7
6) line 50. <--> , /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/Apache/ASP.pm line 1740

It doesn't look like I have any runaway strings, so any idea what gives?

Thanks
Dmitry

At 09:01 PM 7/29/00, Joshua Chamas wrote:
>If you could tell me more about this sometime, like where you
>are going with this, and how this might be brought into the
>server to ease developer use that would be great.  Its still
>takes a bit to get my head around XML ways of looking at things.
>Dmitry Beransky wrote:
> >
> > That's where the XForm may come quite handy
> > (<http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/>).  The specification is still been
> > worked on, but it has some parts that can already be used on the back
> > end.  I can see it (me thinks) fit quite nicely into Apache::ASP XML
> > processor.  I thought about coding it up, but never got the time.
> >

Re: XForms & ASP (was: The Template Toolkit )

Posted by Joshua Chamas <jo...@chamas.com>.

Dmitry Beransky wrote:
>
> [Mon Jul 31 10:45:53 2000] (eval 76): String found where operator expected at
> (eval 76) line 50, at end of line
> [Mon Jul 31 10:45:53 2000] (eval 76):   (Missing operator before ?)
> [Mon Jul 31 10:45:53 2000] [error] [asp] [605] [error] [Mon Jul 31 10:45:53 20
> 00] (eval 76): Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at (eval 7
> 6) line 50. <--> , /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/Apache/ASP.pm line 1740
> 
> It doesn't look like I have any runaway strings, so any idea what gives?
> 

The XMLSubsMatch parser is pretty aggressive, and found a
tag in your <% perl code %> that it tried parsing.  If you 
had debug 2 set, the output would give you more of a hint
as to what was going on.  It doesn't only look for tags 
in the HTML segments, though this is what it ought to do.

I would recommend using the Script_OnFlush event handler
to grab all of the data at once and process it with XML, or the 
XSLT extension even.  You can find the response buffer in 
$Response->{BinaryRef} as a scalar reference.  This member
is documented at:

  http://www.apache-asp.org/objects.html

Only if you are looking to extend all forms with the 
the xform might I implement this with XMLSubsMatch.

-- Joshua
_________________________________________________________________
Joshua Chamas			        Chamas Enterprises Inc.
NodeWorks >> free web link monitoring	Huntington Beach, CA  USA 
http://www.nodeworks.com                1-714-625-4051

Re: XForms & ASP

Posted by Joshua Chamas <jo...@chamas.com>.

Dmitry Beransky wrote:
> ...
> recognizable tokens (as in '<'.'form').  Unfortunately, I cannot use XML or
> XSLT processing, as you recommend, because the content of the tags often is
> HTML.  This brings me to another question.  Is (would) it possible to do
> recursive recursive XML processing (similar to XSLT) with ASP?  Here's an
> example:
> 
> <html>
> <head>
>     <xform id="formID">
>        ...
>     </xform>
> </head>
> <body>
>     ...
>     <asp:form id="formID">
>         First name: <asp:input id="firstName"/>
>         Last name: <asp:input id="lastName"/>
>     </asp:form>
> </body>
> </html>
> 
> What I need to do is to process the asp:form element, transform the tag
> itself into appropriate html and then recursively process its content, so
> that I could get to the asp:input tags.
> 

If its HTML you need, you could substitute a call to 
HTML::Parser instead with a XMLSub <asp:form> to 
look for the input tags.  You could also do this
all at once at the Script_OnFlush event to parse
both the xform and form at runtime.

If you wanted just a XMLSubsMatch approach, you will have
to work backwards, because inner tags are evaluated
first as sub routines.  If you need the input data when you 
evaluate the <asp:form>, then you could try using script
globals to capture data for you, like in each input tag
you could set something in $Inputs{$id} = $data and 
then reference %Inputs in your <asp:form> ... that's
pretty backwards, and is a limitation with a pure 
XMLSubs approach to a problem like this.

Best of luck, and I am very interested in what you 
end up with.

-- Joshua