Hi Simon,
For our metadata editor project you've setup an initial version of a
'snippet service'. We will most likely use and XForms solution that will
dynamically request these snippets.
Some background info for the GN devel list subscribers:
------------
This snippet service allows for requesting snippets of GN's internal
template representation for building a metadata edit form. This can be
particularly useful when building an editor that requests bits and
pieces for building its form only when it needs to.
The idea behind this all is: when creating a form, finding out what
attributes and child nodes are required/allowed etc using XSD and
Schematron is difficult to do (especially in the case of ISO-19139 with
many XSDs and rules). Since GN already has tackled this problem, why not
use what GN knows?
Please don't hesitate to ask if you're interested and want to know more
about it.
------------
Simon, we've got a few questions about the current implementation of the
snippet service:
- You've set up the initial service on a BlueNet test instance. Are you
OK with us advertising the URL on this list?
- What version/branch of GN would you advise us to use in our newly
created sandbox? The vanilla GN trunk/2.2 or the BlueNet one?
- Would it be wise to have the snippet service code in that sandbox?
- As you explained to us, the service doesn't include CodeLists yet. How
much work would it be to include these too and would that create a
different snippet for, say 'gmd:language' (which is a text field now)?
- The current web user interface in GN for editing metadata has
information about mandatory elements and human readable labels (and help
info). That info does not appear in the snippets. How can we retrieve
that info for our editor?
- We have been trying to 'manually' use the available XSL files that
convert a GN 'internal representation' XML file into a the web HTML form
that GN currently uses, but haven't succeeded. Can you give a hint what
XSL files to use and in what order?
- We need to be able to handle 'special cases', ie where the data
maintainer's requirements are different from the standard. Your idea was
to allow adding a custom XSD to GN for these purposes. How would this
affect the snippet service?
Cheers,
Roald
--
Roald de Wit
Software Engineer
roald.dewit@anonymised.com
Commercial Support for Open Source GIS Software
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