Specifying submission requests

The del.icio.us API supports all sorts of methods for adding, deleting and retrieving your links. The particular method that we are interested in for the moment is add, which allows us to post new links to the store.

Although called an API, the actual interaction we have with del.icio.us is via simple HTTP requests. To add a link to the del.icio.us store for example, we need to send the correct information to the following URL:

http://del.icio.us/api/posts/add

The specific parameters del.icio.us needs from us to store a link, are:

• url: the URL of the item;
• description: a description of the item.

XForms will automatically create parameters in the request using the names that we use in the controls, so we made sure earlier to set the names in our input controls to be the same as for the del.icio.us add method:

<xf:input ref="url">
  <xf:label>URL:</xf:label>
</xf:input>
<xf:input ref="description">
  <xf:label>Description:</xf:label>
</xf:input>

All we have to do now is define the end-point for the request--where we want this data sent to. For this we use the XForms submission element, which is part of the XForms model. (The model provides us with a lot of features beyond just submitting data, and we'll see more of these later.)

To set up the request, insert the following model and submission elements into the head element in your form:

    </style>
    <xf:model>
      <xf:submission id="sub-add-link"
	action="http://del.icio.us/api/posts/add" method="get"
      />
    </xf:model>
  </head>

This gives us a request that will send the values in our two controls to del.icio.us, but we still need some way to kick off the submission.