Weekly Summary

I'm headed to the airport in just a few minutes to catch a flight to Florida, so I thought I'd post a quick summary of what I've done this past week to catch everyone up.

In addition to further developing the Adult Initial Verification Form in OpenOffice, I've been posting to the OOo XML developer's list and discovering some new things. The coolest is OO's ability to link to local or remote instance data that will fill in a form with some saved values. From the mailing list:

Yes, initializing an instance from a remote location is possible (given
that that location is reachable).

The dialog that you mention has a "link" check-box. If you link the
instance, it will be retrieved every time the document is loaded. If you
leave it unchecked, the external instance will be copied into the
document and stored there. In case of a document internal instance,
changes that a user makes to the instance data via bound form controls
will be persisted with the document when it is saved.

When you bind a form control to a node in the data navigator, the
pre-filling that you mention should work. The easist way of creating
such a binding is to drag the node from the navigator onto the document...

Bests,
Lars

mharriso@student.umass.edu wrote:
> I've tried OO Users and Writer Users list with this question, and both directed
> me here. Hopefully someone can help me...
>
> Does anyone know if OO is capable of getting XML forms instance data from a
> remote source? MS InfoPath is capable of loading XML data into a form and the
> forms are filled out with pre-defined values. In OO, I've noticed there is the
> option to add instance data, and the window that pops up asks for a name and a
> URL, which I take to mean remote or local. There's a browse button for local
> data, and it gets added to the data navigator, but I can't seem to get it to
> pre-fill the forms.
>
> Example: In my schema, I have . I want to be able to
> load up a file containing Matthew Harrison and
> have the "Name" field on my form filled out with that value.
>
> -Matthew Harrison

I've tested this out, and sure enough it works. Now I need to figure out how to automate the task of loading the instance data. It's doable, I just haven't quite worked out how.

I've also started writing "Creating Forms in OpenOffice" on the OpenMRS wiki and also created a link to it from the project page. I hope to get this finished up by this weekend.

I'll be back on Friday the 6th, and until then I can be reached via email if needed.