Creating Applications: An Overview
The following steps briefly describe how to make a new application:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.