Dealing with XForms
XForms defines a variation on traditional webforms which allows
them to be used on a wider variety of platforms and browsers
or even non-traditional media such as PDF documents.
The first key difference in xforms is how the form is sent
to the client. XForms for HTML Authors contains a detailed
description of how to create XForms, for the purpose of
this tutorial we'll only be looking at a simple example.
Example 2-8. A simple XForms search form
<h:html xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2002/xforms">
<h:head>
<h:title>Search</h:title>
<model>
<submission action="http://example.com/search"
method="post" id="s"/>
</model>
</h:head>
<h:body>
<h:p>
<input ref="q"><label>Find</label></input>
<submit submission="s"><label>Go</label></submit>
</h:p>
</h:body>
</h:html>
The above form displays a text input box (named q), and
a submit button. When the submit button is clicked, the
form will be sent to the page referred to by action.
Here's where it starts to look different from your web
application's point of view. In a normal HTML form, the
data would be sent as application/x-www-form-urlencoded,
in the XForms world however, this information is sent as
XML formatted data.
If you're choosing to work with XForms then you probably
want that data as XML, in that case, look in $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA
where you'll find the XML document generated by the browser
which you can pass into your favorite XSLT engine or document
parser.
If you're not interrested in formatting and just want your
data to be loaded into the traditional $_POST variable,
you can instruct the client browser to send it as application/x-www-form-urlencoded
by changing the method attribute to urlencoded-post.
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