Rendering an ECM Form

[kamlesh]

Hi,

I am using Labs 3c version of Alfresco for evaluation purpose. XForms rendition in Alfresco web-client is not supported for ECM forms the way it is supported for WCM forms. Following is the quote from Alfresco wiki page:

ECM Forms, also known as 'DM Forms' or simply 'Forms', are now available in Alfresco 2.9 Community Labs release for testing and evaluation. These allow structured XML content to be created based on an XML schema (XSD). Unlike 'Web Forms', they do not directly support renditions although Content Transformations can be used to achieve similar results.

With reference to the above my queries are:
1) Do I need to write explicit content transformation code for rendering ECM form? [Of course this will require Chiba related stuff]?
2) Can I reuse the repository APIs to achieve the same. (As the same functionality is implemented for WCM forms)?
3) Will the combination of option 1 and 2 be required?

Regards,
Kamlesh

[zaizi]

What solution are you trying to build?

[kamlesh]

The XML file generated using ECM Form feature of Alfresco is specific to Chiba and Alfresco (contains namespaces specific to them). I want to transform this XML in form of a html. So that the file can be rendered in a browser properly.

For example, a standalone Chiba application does server side XForms transformation and renders a file to the end user by converting it into html. Something similar I want to achieve.

My basic requirement is to incorporate Forms feature in Alfresco, wherein an user can upload a form definition and she can design and view a form using that form definition. I am trying to match my requirement with ECM Forms.

Can you through some lights on this.

Regards,
Kamlesh

[zaizi]

You can do that with Custom Template using Freemarker. Let's assume all your ECM forms are being created within Space X. You can write a custom template and assign it to Space X to "render" the XML files in a certain way. You can make this as rich / functional as you like.

See Calendar implementation from Alfresco 2.9. It renders an entire calendar application using custom template which makes use of Yahoo UI to render events defined in XML files within the Space.