Reusing XForm/Chiba in Alfresco Share

[orichaud]

We use share to store our multimedia content and have created some custom types and now we would like to store huge XML files which represent structured data entered by users. These XML files are governed by a XSD schema.

We would like to provide forms and to enter those data and update them. We are very reluctant at developing custom web forms as the expected complexity is  high.We also noticed  that Alfresco supports XForm and embeds Chiba. Thus with the XSD, XForms and the necessary CSS tuning, we would have a powerful solution that would allow a huge cut  on developments. As far as In understand, this integration has been done for WCM and I would like to understand if there is a chance to reuse this integration in Share.

Regards.

Olivier

[mrogers]

An XML implementation of the forms service has always been planned.    So it should not be too hard to implement since the implementation has been designed with other back ends including XML in mind.

However although (I think) Alfresco 2.9 had an experimental implementation of the WCM forms on the DM store it was not successful hence the decision to introduce a new forms service for Alfresco 3.

[orichaud]

Hi and thanks for your reply.

A few clarifications I would like to have:
- Can you tell me what you mean by "XML implementation of the forms service"? Should I understand a service which deduce a form from a XSD and then processes and serves XML document stored as document into the repository?
- Can you tell me what went wrong with the WCM forms? Does it mean Chiba did not prove to be a good tool that we could rely on?

Lazily, we were looking for something almost out the box in Alfresco.

My investigation also led me to consider Orbeon. Has anybody on your side looked at this?

Regards.

Olivier

[windauer]

Hi Olivier,

I fear I haven't understood your question. If you wan't to generate XForms out of a XSD file there is a project build upon Chiba called WSDL2XForms (see http://sourceforge.net/projects/wsdl2xforms). I you have to use Chiba because of Alfresco this might work.

If you are free in your decision I would recommend a more up to XForms implementation (Chiba only supports XForms 1.0). For your information, I was one of the main developers at Chiba for its last two year. The latest stable Chiba release was in February 2008. Together with Joern Turner I founded the betterFORM (http://www.betterform.de) project which is a lightweight server side implementation of the XForms 1.1 recommendation based on a Chiba fork. The betterFORM development is very vital and a new release will be available within the next few weeks (http://betterform.wordpress.com/2011/01/20/whats-new-in-betterform-limegreen) . Perhaps you wan't to risk a look 🙂

regards

Lars