XForms/Picoforms

Getting XForms to work with Picoforms

Picoforms is commercial XForms client that is designed to work with mobile phones and IE 6.0 as a plugin.

To get IE to see the forms you have to do the following:

If your forms are stored in the server with an XHTML extension you must

Make sure that IE knows to render .XHTML files as html file types. This can be done by using the registry edit tool.
Add the following processing instruction for picoforms AFTER the html element

IE 6.0 Registry MIME-Type Fix

To change the IE registry to allow IE to know that .xhtml files should be rendered as html. To do this do the following. From the Windows start menu click Start/Run. Enter "regedit" and press enter. Use the Registry browser to navigate to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT folder and then find the MIME/Daatabase/Content Type folder.

From their add the following:

Binding for xhtml files:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Content Type\application/xhtml+xml]
"CLSID"="{25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13}"
"Extension"=".xhtml"
"Encoding"=hex:08,00,00,00

Binding for xq files:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Content Type\application/xhtml+xml]
"CLSID"="{25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13}"
"Extension"=".xq"
"Encoding"=hex:08,00,00,00

The CLSID above is for HTML rendering. You can copy this from the .htm MIME-type. If you want it to render in xml use the binding for XML files.

Sample HTML Header

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
    xmlns:xf="http://www.w3.org/2002/xforms" 
    xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" 
    xmlns:ev="http://www.w3.org/2001/xml-events" >
    <?import namespace="xf" implementation="#default#pxf"?>
    <head>
...

Note that if you are using eXist to generate your forms you need to put the PI inside braces and serialize as html.

declare option exist:serialize "method=html media-type=text/html indent=yes omit-xml-declaration=yes";
...
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:xf="http://www.w3.org/2002/xforms" 
      xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" 
      xmlns:ev="http://www.w3.org/2001/xml-events" >
      {<?import namespace="xf" implementation="#default#pxf"?>}
      <head>...

Also, make sure if you make changes you should be sure to use SHIFT-reload to clear the IE cache.

CSS Issues

Note that IE6 does not recognize the @namepsace directive in CSS files. These CSS files will need to be converted use xf\: instead of the CSS | standard.

References

Picoforms Web Site

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