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We’re getting ready for a new version of Sidewinder and in the process we’re building a few desktop applications to show what you can do with the new features. One of these applications makes use of Backpack to store tasks and reminders, and during the course of developing it, Phil decided to set up a simple XForm that can access every feature of Backpack. It’s such a handy little form that we thought we’d share it with you–if you’re planning to build an XForms application that uses Backpack you’ll definitely want to take a look, but the form has more general use too in that it shows how to use the formsPlayer extensions to control all aspects of data submission.

One problem with XForms’ submission is that the URL to interact with is a straightforward string, but this is no use with the many RESTful APIs that are emerging, where the resources you want to interact with are encoded in the URL, rather than with query parameters.

Backpack has three further complicating factors; first, your user name is actually used as a sub-domain to access your data:

http://yourname.backpackit.com/ws/

Second, a specific request header is required – X-POST_DATA_FORMAT must be set to xml. And the third is perhaps the most complicated – the URLs themselves need to be dynamic; for example, to update the content of item 5 on page 1234, the URL will be something like:

http://yourname.backpackit.com/ws/page/1234/items/update/5

A submission to Backpack is probably about as complicated as an XForms submission is ever likely to get, and Phil’s code shows how to implement all of these things using the formsPlayer submission extensions.

(Note that if you don’t have formsPlayer installed already this form will automatically install it using a signed CAB file.)