Configurable form / flow chains

[Bruyn Bill <Br...@mcao.maricopa.gov>]

Hello, list.

As I said separately the other day, I'm trying to put together a proof
of concept for a kind of document generation facility here.  It feels
like Cocoon has all the pieces I would need, but I'm struggling a little
bit with which pieces I should be using and how they would work
together.  A high level overview of what I'm trying to achieve:

I have a super-user type person on staff who is going to be creating
document templates with an Adobe Forms designer product.  In short,
Adobe Forms Server takes an XML document via EJB and it returns an
"Adobe Form".  You can make changes to your PDF and submit it back to
the server (again, an EJB) for an updated XML representation.  I'll need
to take that result and persist it to some database.  It looks like I
have some options here, and I'd love to hear ideas on how this might
best be implemented, but my immediate concern is how to produce the XML
document that gets presented to the EJB.

When my super-user designs the template, she'll be using an "Adobe forms
designer" GUI to drag and drop elements onto the form.  That 'binding'
is saved with the template, and the forms server puts the inbound XML on
the template appropriately.  I will have hundreds of these Adobe
templates, some of which require almost no data at all, and some of
which require lots and lots of data.  I thought I'd create a set of
reusable data access / collection mechanisms that could be referenced by
my super-user/designer in the sitemap, so that as templates are added /
updated, she just configures her pipeline with the data that she needs.

I think I'd be able to do this without any trouble if my component data
could be obtained from a database without interaction (using e.g.,
map:aggregate).  But I'm going to need some interaction with the end
user along the way, so I thought I'd use forms and/or flow to achieve
that.  I don't really want to create a flowscript for each document
though, so I guess what I need is a way to chain these interactions
together dynamically.  Or more accurately, through configuration.

Is there any good way/s to use built-in Cocoon features to get what I'm
after here?



Thanks very much for your time.


Bill Bruyn



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