Core Form Controls
Form controls are declared using markup elements, and their behavior refined via markup attributes.
The core form controls are described in this section, including their attributes and their content models (their metadata elements). A core form control is an element that acts as a direct point of user interaction and often provides read, write, or read/write access to a node of instance data.
XForms Core Form Controls
The table below shows an overview of these controls.
| Core Form Control Element | Attributes | Minimal Content Model |
|---|---|---|
| input | Common, Single Node Binding, UI Common, incremental | label, UI Common |
| secret | Common, Single Node Binding, UI Common, incremental | label, UI Common |
| textarea | Common, Single Node Binding, UI Common, incremental | label, UI Common |
| output | Common, Single Node Binding (optional), appearance, value, mediatype | label (optional), mediatype (optional), UI Common |
| upload | Common, Single Node Binding, UI Common, mediatype, incremental | label, mediatype (optional), filename (optional), UI Common |
| range | Common, Single Node Binding, UI Common, start, end, step, incremental | label, UI Common |
| trigger | Common, Single Node Binding (optional), UI Common | label, UI Common |
| submit | Common, Single Node Binding (optional), UI Common, submission | label, UI Common |
| select | Common, Single Node Binding, UI Common, selection, incremental | label, List UI Common, UI Common |
| select1 | Common, Single Node Binding, UI Common, selection, incremental | label, List UI Common, UI Common |
For all Core Form Control elements, the label element is required, unless stated otherwise.
Elements from the UI Common group are always optional.
Attributes from the Common Attributes group and the UI Common Attributes group are always optional.
Attributes from the Single Node Binding Attributes group are always required, unless stated otherwise.
The incremental attribute is of type xsd:boolean (true | false) and is always optional.
Common Support Elements
The table below shows an overview of additional support elements for form controls.
| Support Element | Attributes | Minimal Content Model |
|---|---|---|
| label | Common, Single Node Binding (optional) | PCDATA | UI Content |
| help | Common, Single Node Binding (optional) | PCDATA | UI Content |
| hint | Common, Single Node Binding (optional) | PCDATA | UI Content |
| alert | Common, Single Node Binding (optional) | PCDATA | UI Content |
| filename (for upload) | Common, Single Node Binding | EMPTY |
| mediatype (for upload) | Common, Single Node Binding | EMPTY |
| mediatype (for output) | Common, Single Node Binding, value | EMPTY |
| choices (for selection controls) | Common | label (optional), List UI Common |
| item (for selection controls) | Common | label, value, UI Common |
| value (for selection controls) | Common, Single Node Binding (optional) | PCDATA |
Content Sets
The following content sets are used.
UI Common
The UI Common set contains the common support elements help, hint and alert as well as any element from the Action content set.
List UI Common
The List UI Common set contains the choices, item and itemset elements.
UI Content
The UI Content set allows zero or more output elements as well as a set of elements from the xhtml namespace.
PCDATA
Several of the support elements allow text as content. This is indicated by the term PCDATA, which means parsed character data.
Specification
Link to the XForms specification: Core Form Controls.