Creating Applications: An Overview

The following steps briefly describe how to make a new application:

  1. Design a template, adding forms and fields. In the beginning, it is not that important to use the correct names in each of the fields - these will be added later.
  2. Add structural template attributes such as template:element, template:attribute and template:value so that the fields sit in different parts of the input document format being modelled. Replace the field names with special functions such as template:field-name(). For buttons which add and remove parts of the input document, employ selector notation and the template:this-position() function.
  3. Where multiple choice fields are employed, input documents must be transformed so that the multiple choice options are included in the output. This can be achieved using documents containing the different option values and transformations which insert those values into the input document.
  4. To produce the output document, the template needs preparing first so that an output stylesheet is produced; then, the output stylesheet is applied to the processed input document utilising various extension functions which produce the computed field names in the final output document.

Recommendations

  1. Where multiple fields exist and can be added and removed, put them inside a separate element so that the selectors can successfully identify them. Otherwise, changing element orders can result in the wrong element being selected.
  2. Make sure that transformations on the input document produce all the necessary elements for the output document so that the resulting page gives the user the opportunity to specify data that is missing.