Form data

Data capture

When displaying a designed form using Digiforms Server, a set of rules will be executed to enable xml data capture. This is part of a patented method that allows designing reversible stylesheets. Stylesheets that can operate both-ways on data.

XML document ROOT

Defining the root node of the xml-document format we want to capture

Access the document settings by selecting [File] and [Document settings] from the main menu. You may leave the default ( doc ) if you don’t have a specific node name to use as document root. If there is a specific XML document structure to be captured, please map root node from an instance of the XML. Utilizing the default ( doc ) root node, captured information from the form would look like this:

XML

Document settings dialog to edit document context and encoding settings

Specify the xml character encoding

Internationalization

Encoding is the character set of your XML document. You may choose between two predefined sets of encoding, the ISO-8859-1 and the UTF-8 (default). The ISO-8859-1 is the standard in Western European countries and supports a wide range of Latin-1 characters and symbols. The UTF-8 standard supports a wider range of characters and symbols than the ISO-8859-1 encoding. We recommend using the UTF-8 Encoding for multilingual projects.

Defining page(s) with data context

Extending the captured XML document

When document root is defined, (we use "doc" for this example), it is time to add page(s) to the form. Each page template can be defined to have a specific context in the captured xml data, MATCH. If the page template defines a context that does not exist, Digiforms Server will construct the neccesary context based on the defined template match. The default page template in Digiforms Designer, defines the context as "template". This means that if the document is viewed using a browser, the captured XML format would look like this:

XML

Access the template property dialog by right-clicking the page template tab and select [Template Properties].

Accessing template properties

Page template properties

Define form controls with data references

Allowing user input mapped to xml elements ( xpath )

Each page template can be defined to have a specific xpath context. Inherited from this context, all form fields define their path to their related xml-elements using XPath. The default XPath of a form field in Digiforms Designer is "XPath". If we added an input-field to our page template leaving all default values unchanged, the captured XML format would look like this:

XML