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Potential Methods to Integrate with Cascade
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This section is an incomplete work in progress |
Cascade is a commonly used tool to manage web sites at Northwestern and a good use case for an external wrapper as described above. One approach to integrate the two is the following (assuming you have some generic page components).
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- Create a new Form Asset metadata set based off of your standard metadata set. Add a new dynamic field, form_url, with label “Online Forms URL” that is text, required, and inline. Add a new dynamic field, base_url, with label “Site URL After Publish” that is text, required, and inline.
- Create a new Form Page template based off of your standard template. Add a FORM-BASE region to the top of your <head> and a FORM-EMBED region where you want the form to be embedded. Putting if you after DEFAULT will allow your users to edit text above the form.
- Create a new Form Page configuration set based off of your standard configuration set but linked to the Form Page template
- Link the FORM-BASE region to a block that can access the formbase_url metadata metadata field created above with a format that translates the URL in to a base tag when published (e.g., form-base.xsl)
- Link the FORM-EMBED region to a block that can access the form_url metadata field created above with a format that translates the URL in to a JavaScript redirect when published but displays a message to the user while in Cascade (e.g., form-embed.xsl)
- Create a new Form Page content type based off of ...the Form Page configuration set and the Form Asset metadata set with your standard data definition
Using the Form Content Type
- Create a new asset using your standard page factory
- Switch the content type to the new Form Page content type
- Provide the value for the form_url (and set it to what?)Online Forms URL and the Site URL After Publish
- Publish your page
You could optionally create a new base asset and asset factory for this content type. This example does not implement that because (a) it is likely to be a rarely used factory and (b) using it properly requires insight in to the forms engine to provide the URL so additional requiring the application of the content type isn't adding much complexity (i.e., everyday editors won't be able to set up the form itself, only a power user can and they can also understand content types).