Chapter 4, Exchanging Data Between an External Application
and a Basic XFA Form
XFA Specification
Creating, Updating, and Unloading a Basic XFA Data DOM
133
<lastname>Porter</lastname>
</author>
</book>
The result of the mapping is as follows:
[dataGroup (book)]
[dataValue (ISBN) = "15536455"]
[dataValue (title) = "Introduction to XML"]
[dataGroup (author)]
[dataValue (firstname) = "Charles"]
[dataValue (lastname) = "Porter"]
As specified above, an element is not a candidate for mapping to a
dataGroup
node if it is enclosed
within an element mapped to a
dataValue
node; this because dataValue nodes can not be ancestors to
dataGroup
nodes. An example illustrating this case is presented in
“Data Values Containing Element
Content” on page 132.
Attributes
The data loader by default refrains from loading attributes into the XFA Data DOM. This applies to
attributes of elements associated with both data values and data groups. On output the data unloader by
default reinserts the original attributes from the XML Data DOM into the corresponding elements of the
new XML data document. For any given element the order in which the data unloader reinserts the
attributes is implementation-defined. This is appropriate because the order of attributes is not significant
according to the XML specification [XML].
Consider the following XML data document:
<book status="stocked">
<ISBN>15536455</ISBN>
<title alternate="XML in Six Lessons">Introduction to XML</title>
</book>
In the above example the XML element
book
maps to a data group and has a
status
attribute with a
value of
"stocked"
. The XML element
title
maps to a data value and has an
alternate
attribute with
a value of
"XML in Six Lessons"
. Based upon the by default rule to ignore attributes the result of the
mapping is as follows:
[dataGroup (book)]
[dataValue (ISBN)
= "15536455"]
[dataValue (title) = "Introduction to XML"]
White Space Handling
XML data documents often include additional white space within elements strictly as a legibility aid; this
white space is considered insignificant. Establishing comprehensive white space handling rules
contributes to predictable processing of XML data documents.
An XFA application must produce the same result from processing two documents that differ only by
insignificant white space.
The following Unicode characters are considered white space, as defined by [XML]:
●
space U+0020