Chapter 4, Exchanging Data Between an External Application
and a Basic XFA Form
XFA Specification
Creating, Updating, and Unloading a Basic XFA Data DOM
121
[dataGroup (book)]
[dataValue (ISBN) = "15536455"]
[dataValue (title) = "Introduction to XML"]
[dataGroup (author)]
[dataValue (firstname) = "Charles"]
[dataValue (lastname) = "Porter"]
In some complex XML data documents the elements that correspond to data groups or data values may
be annotated with an XML namespace [XMLNAMES]. In these cases, the namespace and, if present, the
namespace prefix are shown in the notation used here even though they are not present in the XFA Data
DOM itself. The notation is as follows:
[dataGroup (prefix:book) xmlns="uri"]
[dataValue (prefix:ISBN) = "15536455" xmlns="uri"]
In order to not clutter each example with namespace information, only examples that depend upon
namespace information will include this form of the notation. The
prefix
refers to a namespace prefix as
described by [XMLNAMES]. The
uri
refers to the corresponding Uniform Resource Identifier as described by
RFC2396: Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax
[URI].
The
isNull
and
nullType
properties are not illustrated in the above examples. To avoid clutter they are
only shown if the value of
isNull
is true. The value
1
is used to represent true.
It is worth repeating that the above notation is provided only as means within this specification to depict
the structure and content within an XFA Data DOM.
Default Data Mapping Rules
There is a set of rules that govern, by default, how an XML data document is mapped to an XFA Data DOM
and vice-versa. These rules have the effect of directing the data loader to usefully interpret the XML
document content by mapping the physical structures of an XML data document into data values and
data groups. In addition they direct the data unloader to map the data values and data groups into a new
XML data document.
The default mapping rules may be overridden by options in the configuration document (i.e. the
config
section of the XDP). Those options and their effects are described in
“Extended Mapping Rules” on
page 362.
Document Range
The term
document range
refers to the portion of the XML data document that is processed by the data
loader, such as the whole XML data document or a fragment. Assuming the XML data document starts as a
file containing serialized XML, the first step in processing is to load the entire content of the XML data
document into an XML Data DOM. The portion of the XML data document corresponding to the
document range is then loaded into and accessible from the XFA Data DOM, and any portions of the data
that are outside of the document range are not accessible via the XFA Data DOM. When the data unloader
creates a new XML data document it stitches together the data within the XFA Data DOM and the data
excluded from the XFA Data DOM (but still in the XML Data DOM) to create a new serialized XML file.
The document range can be influenced via the use of a number of extended mapping rules, however there
is a by default document range which is described in more detail in the following subsections.
The document range is the portion of content corresponding to the intersecting result of applying the
rules described by the following sections, in order. In other words, the mechanisms described by this