IBM XForms Generator Test
- Thilo Schuler (Unlicensed)
The Eclipse-based IBM XForms Generator (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xfg) was used to automatically generate an GUI using a simple openEHR composition instance (contains a blood glucose level observation) and the openEHR XML Schemata (Release 1.0.1).
This is the result, without any manual tweaking: crude XForms GUI (compound document: XForms markup embedded in XHTML) and a supporting CSS style sheet.
The easiest way to view it is downloading both files plus the original composition and the openEHR XML Schemata to the same location and opening compositon.xhtml with the Firefox 2.0.x Browser that has the XForms extension installed.
Obviously this is very simple using only the xsd:string data type because the generator doesn't know the openEHR types, but it includes repeatable sections where the openEHR types have a "maxOccurs=unbounded" attribute. IBM uses this generator for initial scaffold GUIs from instance+/-schema data or WSDL documents. Here are two more interesting links:
- HL7 CDA demo (generator was used for initial scaffolding)
- tax form tutorial (explains how the generator was used)
It would be cool if we could in the mid-/longterm achieve a similar generator aimed specifically at openEHR, probably by adding some custom extensions to the standard (see http://xformsinstitute.com/essentials/browse/ch11.php). This could then be used both for generic GUIs and as starting point for customised XForms-based GUIs.