Generating forms from XML Schema

[mats_trash]

I've been doing some fairly extensive searching on this topic and have
not yet found a solution that doesn't involve recoding the schema in
some framework-specific xml and jumping through various other hoops.
Is there not some
web-2.0-framework-publishing-(non)-bells-and-whistles-technology that
will take a valid XML Schema and create either an XForm or standard
HTML form, publish it, and then validate the subsquent data submission
against the Schema. In a perfect world this would be also make it easy
to store the data in an native or XML-enabled database.

I've looked at Cocoon for example but this requires redoing the Schemas
in proprietary xml which I inherently dislike. Furthermore this would
make it difficult to achieve a wider ambition of having a system where
third party schemas could be processed on the fly for optional
'subforms' of the main form (though these schemas would all be built
from standard building blocks, just with different permutations and
combinations)

Cheers

 

[Joe Kesselman]

Good thought, but it tends not to survive contact with the real world.

There were many attempts at this early in the evolution of XML Schemas.
None of them were really particularly usable/useful; schemas don't
generally contain enough metadata about the meaning of the information
to let you generate a really user-friendly set of forms, and so the idea
didn't really catch on. You wind up with a much better user experience
if you take the time to hand-implement the interaction.

Also, forms entry doesn't deal very well with optional sections and
recursion -- you'd need to spawn sub-forms based on interaction with the
user, which doesn't fit neatly into the concept of a single HTML form.
(I'm not sure whether XForm does any better in that regard.)

There are certainly schema-directed XML editors, but they tend to be
aimed at folks who are already near-experts in the specific schema
they're working with and hence don't need a lot of user prompting -- or
rely on schemas having been annotated with additional information to
guide the user interface generation. And they rely on presenting a
richer set of interaction techniques than a simple form can provide.

 

[vjbytes]

Have you looked at

http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xfg

The default submit generated is to an echo server.
However being IBM, I would recommend storing it in DB2 9 with native
XML

thanks,
Vijay