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<title>Dealing with XForms</title>
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<h1>Dealing with XForms</h1>
<p class="para">
<a href="http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/" class="link external">» XForms</a> defines a variation on traditional
webforms which allows them to be used on a wider variety of platforms and
browsers or even non-traditional media such as PDF documents.
</p>
<p class="para">
The first key difference in XForms is how the form is sent to the client.
<a href="http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/2003/xforms-for-html-authors.html" class="link external">» <em>XForms for HTML Authors</em></a>
contains a detailed description of how to create XForms, for the purpose
of this tutorial we'll only be looking at a simple example.
</p>
<div class="example" id="example-354">
<p><strong>Example #1 A simple XForms search form</strong></p>
<div class="example-contents">
<div class="htmlcode"><pre class="htmlcode"><h:html xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2002/xforms">
<h:head>
<h:title>Search</h:title>
<model>
<submission action="http://example.com/search"
method="post" id="s"/>
</model>
</h:head>
<h:body>
<h:p>
<input ref="q"><label>Find</label></input>
<submit submission="s"><label>Go</label></submit>
</h:p>
</h:body>
</h:html></pre>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="para">
The above form displays a text input box (named <em><code class="parameter">q</code></em>),
and a submit button. When the submit button is clicked, the form will be
sent to the page referred to by <em>action</em>.
</p>
<p class="para">
Here's where it starts to look different from your web application's point
of view. In a normal HTML form, the data would be sent as
<em>application/x-www-form-urlencoded</em>, in the XForms world
however, this information is sent as <acronym title="eXtensible Markup Language">XML</acronym> formatted data.
</p>
<p class="para">
If you're choosing to work with XForms then you probably want that data as
<acronym title="eXtensible Markup Language">XML</acronym>, in that case, look in <var class="varname"><var class="varname"><a href="reserved.variables.httprawpostdata.html" class="classname">$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA</a></var></var> where
you'll find the <acronym title="eXtensible Markup Language">XML</acronym> document generated by the browser which you can pass
into your favorite <acronym title="eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations">XSLT</acronym> engine or document parser.
</p>
<p class="para">
If you're not interested in formatting and just want your data to be loaded
into the traditional <var class="varname"><var class="varname"><a href="reserved.variables.post.html" class="classname">$_POST</a></var></var> variable, you can instruct
the client browser to send it as <em>application/x-www-form-urlencoded</em>
by changing the <em><code class="parameter">method</code></em> attribute to
<em class="emphasis">urlencoded-post</em>.
</p>
<div class="example" id="example-355">
<p><strong>Example #2 Using an XForm to populate <var class="varname"><var class="varname"><a href="reserved.variables.post.html" class="classname">$_POST</a></var></var></strong></p>
<div class="example-contents">
<div class="htmlcode"><pre class="htmlcode"><h:html xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2002/xforms">
<h:head>
<h:title>Search</h:title>
<model>
<submission action="http://example.com/search"
method="urlencoded-post" id="s"/>
</model>
</h:head>
<h:body>
<h:p>
<input ref="q"><label>Find</label></input>
<submit submission="s"><label>Go</label></submit>
</h:p>
</h:body>
</h:html></pre>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<blockquote class="note"><p><strong class="note">Note</strong>:
<span class="simpara">
As of this writing, many browsers do not support XForms.
Check your browser version if the above examples fails.
</span>
</p></blockquote>
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