XForms Data Islands

To achieve this we need to create an XForms data island that will hold all of our items. This may seem a little different to how we worked with the del.icio.us example, but in fact it isn't--all that happened with the del.icio.us form was that formsPlayer created a 'default' data island for us since we didn't specify one explicitly. And it used the form controls that we had provided to 'work out' how the 'automatic' data island should be structured. (This is called 'lazy authoring', for obvious reaons.)

Let's create a data island that contains the items we need for our search on Flickr (instances are placed inside an XForms model):

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="flickr.css" type="text/css" />
    <xf:model>
      <xf:instance>
        <instanceData xmlns="">
          <method>flickr.photos.search</method>
          <api_key>68149024a667e0be3c63708f002ffe1e</api_key>
          <tags />
          <per_page>12</per_page>
        </instanceData>
      </xf:instance>
    </xf:model>
  </head>

Hopefully this all looks familiar to you, since all we have created is one XML item for each of the parameters that Flickr needs, and given each a value should it need one. Note that we've also created an empty entry for tags, even though we have a form control that refers to it. This is because the automatic creation of 'default' items only happens if we don't provide an instance; but once you do create one, then you will have to include within it any items that you need for your controls. However, the input control that we created earlier will correctly reference the tags item in this instance, just as before it was referencing the one that was created automatically.