Liferay: Form Runner settings to use "offline" forms engine

[ebruchez]

Idea that came during a feverish night ;)

The Liferay proxy portlet has a settings page. Currently, it manages by hand an HTML form. This is a little disappointing for a part of a product that manages forms!

So the idea is, instead, to write this using our form processor. But this cannot use the regular JVM environment form processor, as the proxy portlet is just that, a proxy, and doesn't actually include Form Runner, which is "remote". And we need to be able to configure, via these settings, even the location of the remote Form Runner.

So this would instead use the JavaScript environment (AKA "offline") runtime. It would be a way to exercise it, also.

For this to work:

• the proxy portlet JAR must include
  • the Form Runner offline baseline assets (JS and CSS)
  • the compiled (zip) file of the settings form
• the proxy portlet must
  • instead of generate, in doEdit(), a custom HTML form, generate a simple container, a reference to the baseline assets, and a <template> with the compiled form (as we do for "Test Offline")
  • serve the baseline assets from JAR resources
  • be able to respond to the settings from GET/PUT (or POST) of the settings ("settings" service)
• the settings form must
  • include the settings fields
  • do a GET of the existing settings upon load by calling the settings service
  • do a PUT of the existing settings upon "Apply" by calling the settings service

In addition, it would be good to obtain the baseline and compiled form to include in the proxy portlet JAR file automatically at compilation time. As a first step, we could checkin those resources.

[ebruchez]

As an aside, we should also consider whether and how we could, over time, move parts of the Form Builder UI entirely to the client, to improve responsiveness. One difficulty is that some of the settings use dynamic subforms, which are not supported in the JavaScript environment. Maybe this is not so great an issue as those could be compiled on the server, and each individual XBL control setting should need to be compiled only once.