NoPHP: A Conference Website in XForms

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NoPHP: A Conference Website in XForms

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NoPHP: A Conference Website in XForms

July 31, 2019

Steven Pemberton
xforms
Steven Pemberton continues his series on XForms by constructing a conference website.
Contents

Introduction
The Data
The Talks
The Conference Program
The Program
Dates and Times
Error checking

Introduction

Consider this conference program overview:

A Conference Overview Page

If you look at the code, you can see that the page contains all the content, including abstracts for the talks, with the use of several scripts to handle pop ups and so on. The abstracts are initially hidden, but clicking on an “Abstract” button pops up the abstract for a talk:

Talk abstract pop-up

Let’s do this with XForms.
The Data

Firstly, we don’t want the data about the talks in the page. The talks will be stored in two files, the tutorials:

Achim Berndzen Norman Walsh Tony Graham Steven Pemberton

and similar for the talks, but with abstracts:

[Elided]

John Lumley (jwLResearch)*

[Elided]

Erik Siegel (Xatapult)* etc.

We create two instances to store that data:

Since this is to be generic, so that it can also be used in future years, we’ve added the date to the top element of the tutorials data. Now we can start displaying. Starting with the tutorials, we’ll begin with the prelude. The group element sets the context for the enclosed bit so that all enclosed references will by default be to data in the tutorials instance. Since we don’t know how many tutorials there will be each year we let XForms do the work, by outputting a count of the talks.

Preconference Tutorials The preconference day, , will comprise of tutorial sessions by some of the world's foremost experts in their respective fields:

Now we can output the list of tutorials. Note that it deals with more than one author:

which, with suitable CSS, looks like this:

Source
The Talks

These are treated in the same way, except we now want to add a button to display the abstract. It starts the same:

Then comes the button to show the abstract:

Abstract

Attaching the trigger like this to the abstract (ref=“abstract”) means that if there is no abstract, there’ll be no button (we’ve removed the abstract from one of the talks below to show this working).

When the trigger is clicked on, or otherwise activated, a DOMActivate event is sent. This causes the toggle element to be processed.

The toggle element causes a case of a switch element to be activated. Switch has a number of cases, only one of which is visible at a time. Initially by default the first is visible, and a different one can be activated with a toggle. In this case, we have a switch with two cases, one which shows nothing, and the other that shows the abstract:

... this is where we display the abstract ...

To display the abstract, we repeat over the paragraphs of the data. This is preceded by a trigger to hide the abstract again by activating the other case:

×

This looks like this (try it):

Source

This doesn’t pop up the abstract, but just makes it visible. Should popping up be essential to the user experience, then we just change the CSS for that. You really don’t need Javascript for these purposes:

Source

If your complaint is that it is formatted differently to the original, well, we just change the CSS for that as well (this isn’t a CSS tutorial, but if you need a hint, we’ve used display: inline-block).

Source

Finally, if a popping up animation is your thing, you can add that with a bit of CSS as well. (Look up CSS animations to discover how this was done.)

Source
The Conference Program

Later, the conference changed the page to include the timings. Let’s adapt.

The Conference Program
The Program

Our options here are to reorder and add times to the talks document we created, or to create a separate program document.

Let’s do that.

The program consists of a number of days, and each day consists of a number of slots. A slot has a start and end time, and a title:

Registration Declarative Applications with XForms Break XProc 3.0 Lunch XProc 3.0 (cont'd) Break CSS Paged Media Registration Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like

etc.

To display this we repeat over the days, and for each day, repeat over the slots:

Here’s what this looks like:

Source

This of course is still missing the authors and the abstract. We get those from the talks instance by finding the talk whose title is the same as the entry in the slot, and then output the authors and abstract (in the same way as earlier):

... etc ...

If no talk matches the condition, no talk will be selected, and so neither author nor abstract will be output. (By the way, we’ve merged the tutorials instance, and the talks instance for simplicity in this version, and used a different transition in the CSS for the abstracts).

Here’s what it looks like:

Source
Dates and Times

Since the data contains times, an extra feature that we can add is to show which items are in the past, which in the future, and which is happening now.

For instance on Saturday at 11:30, the display could look like this:

The conference program, with items displayed vaguely in the past, and the current item emphasised.

To achieve this, we only have to compare the time for the slot with the time now: if the slot end time is less than the current time, the slot is in the past, if the start time is less than the current time, but the end time isn’t, then the slot is now active, and otherwise the slot is in the future.

In essence, we set the class of the slot by calculating which of three it is, past, future, or now:

That is the essence. Now the detail.

To do the comparisons properly, we need both the time and the date. And because the computer displaying the page may be set to a different timezone, we need the timezone information as well.

One approach would be to set all the start and end attributes in the program data file to include full date and time information:

Registration

and then display the times accordingly:

Then the comparisons would be simple. We have the times in the timezone of the conference, but we need to convert them to the timezone of the computer displaying the page:

class="{if(adjust-dateTime-to-timezone(@end) < instance(‘admin’)/now, ‘past’,
if(adjust-dateTime-to-timezone(@start) < instance(‘admin’)/now, ‘now’,
‘future’))}">

All that we then need to do is update the now value every minute. At startup we dispatch an event we shall call tick:

and we catch it, update the now value, and dispatch another tick, with a delay of a minute (in milliseconds):

That solution, though simple, does require a lot of fiddly work for the author of the data. The other option is to include the parts of the date and time in the data at suitable points:

Registration

(The timezone needs to be included per day, for the case that the conference straddles a change to or from daylight savings time.)

In this case, the display of the times remain the same as the old method, but the comparisons have to be done differently. For each slot we have to construct the time to compare:

concat(…/@date, ‘T’, @start, ‘:00’, …/@timezone)

and again convert to the right timezone::

adjust-dateTime-to-timezone(concat(…/@date, ‘T’, @start, ‘:00’, …/@timezone))

Here it is working. I have faked the dates, so that the conference appears to start today, and the times are in your timezone, so that you can see it working.

Source
Error checking

Suppose that there is a talk in the talks document that was forgotten in the program, or added twice to the program by mistake. To warn for that we repeat over the talk titles:

and output those that don’t occur exactly once in the program:

How do we find out how many times a title occurs in a program? We locate all slots in the program with that title:

instance(‘program’)/day/slot[. = context()]

and then count them:

count(instance(‘program’)/day/slot[. = context()])

That count should be 1.

In full:

If there are no missing or duplicated talks, nothing will show up.

One other thing we can check for is that there are no unaccounted gaps between slots, by reporting all the slots whose start time doesn’t match the preceding slot’s end time:

Source

But if we can check that they abut, why not just assume they do? Each slot then only needs a start time, and unless there is an end time given, we can assume it ends at the start time of the next slot:

Registration Declarative Applications with XForms Break XProc 3.0 Lunch XProc 3.0 (cont'd) Break CSS Paged Media ...

In this version, instead of displaying the times with

we display the end time if it is given, and otherwise the start time of the next slot:

So here is the final version, again with faked dates and timezone, so that you can see it working, and a different CSS style for the current talk:

Source

It comprises 111 lines: 10 for the template, 26 lines of CSS, and 75 lines of XForms, of which 10 are there to support the CSS transition effects, and 2 for faking the dates.
Article contents © 2019 Steven Pemberton
Related links

A News Carousel in XForms
A Game in XForms
A Clock in XForms
A Calendar in XForms
Viewing Data with XForms
An Introduction to XForms

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