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Type annotations
Orbeon Forms supports exposing MIP type annotations to XPath 2.0.
This means that if you have a type associated with a node, e.g.:
<xf:bind ref="age" type="xs:integer">
then the type is not only used for validation, but also determines the typed value of the element node age.
This means that earlier, you had to write the following:
<xf:bind
ref="age"
type="xs:integer"
constraint="xs:integer(.) le 150"/>
With exposing type annotations, you can simply write:
<xf:bind
ref="age"
type="xs:integer"
constraint=". le 150"/>
or:
<xf:bind
ref="date"
type="xs:date"
constraint=". le (current-date() + xdt:dayTimeDuration('P2D'))"/>
NOTE: Type annotations are not automatically enabled for backward compatibility reasons. However, they are enabled by default for new forms created with Form Builder.
The following property controls whether instance types annotations are exposed to XPath 2.0 expressions:
<property
as="xs:boolean"
name="oxf.xforms.expose-xpath-types"
value="true"/>
- If set to
false
(the default), instance types are not made available to XPath expressions. - If set to
true
, they are made available.
You can as usual enable this on a per-page basis:
<xf:model xxf:expose-xpath-types="true">
[SINCE Orbeon Forms 4.2]
You can also enable this on a per-instance basis:
<xf:instance xxf:expose-xpath-types="true">
Static type annotations (with
xf:bind/@type
and xsi:type
) can be used by all XPath expressions, including xf:bind/@calculate
.NOTE: Here is the order in which the XForms engine processes type annotations in the model:
- during a model rebuild, all
xf:bind
point to their associated instance nodes if any - static type annotations with
xf:bind/@type
andxsi:type
are available just after a rebuild - this means that type annotations can be used during subsequent model recalculate _and _revalidate
- however, annotations done via a schema are not reliably available during recalculate