Lotus Forms has supported XForms for a number of years now, and you can get a good idea of all the features supported from the XFDL reference manual.
However, now that XForms 1.1 has been finalized, I've had a number of questions about shining a spotlight on the XForms 1.1 specific features in Lotus Forms. Quite a number of XForms 1.1 features were improvements to the semantics of pre-existing XForms 1.0 features, and no small number of those improvements were based on feedback from the IBM Victoria Software Lab, so obviously we implement those and it would be too long to go into them. The spotlight will be on Lotus Forms features syntactically activated with new XForms 1.1 vocabulary that was not available in XForms 1.0.
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random() - in case you want to write a Lotus Form that plays Black Jack
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current() - to help with data table lookups
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power() - for exponential calculations such as compounded interest payments
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days-to-date() - can be used in combination with days-from-date() to do simple date math like "today plus 90 days"
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seconds-to-dateTime() - can be used in combination with seconds-from-dateTime() to do dateTime math like "now plus 3 hours"
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local-date() - provides the date for the end-user, rather than the UTC date
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local-dateTime() - provides the end-user date and time, rather then the UTC date and time.
Lotus Forms supports the display of images obtained from XForms instance data, in both button and label items, using the mediatype="image/*" attribute setting on xforms:output.
Finally, Lotus Forms supports several of the new features of xforms:submission, including:
- the method="put" and method="delete" attribute settings to round out access to ATOM publishing services
- the relevant and validate attributes, which allows a submission to turn off data validation and relevance pruning. This can be used to implement a "Save to Server" capability so that a user can perform a fill experience over multiple sessions.
- the serialization="none" attribute setting to enable an xforms:submission to perform simple URL activation.
- The targetref attribute, which enables a web service call to replace only a portion or subtree of a data instance.
- The replace="text" attribute setting, which allows a web service call to replace the content of the target data node, rather than the data node itself. This is useful for accessing web services that return textual content rather than XML.
Lotus Forms also has a number of XFDL extensions that add value to the integration with XForms, but that is the subject of another blog for another time.
