Xerte dinamic templates

Dynamic Templates with Xerte
Advanced Interactive Development Julian Tenney August 2007

Introduction....................................................................................................................3 A Simple Quiz Template ...........................................................................................4 Step One: Create the Project Files.............................................................................4 Step Two: Create the XML Template........................................................................4 Step Three: Load the XML into Xerte.......................................................................5 Step Four: Create the Wizard.....................................................................................5 Step Five:Create the Template..................................................................................7 Set up the Background Image ................................................................................8 Setup the Introductory Text ..................................................................................9 Create the Right Number ofQuestions..................................................................9 Create the Prototypical Question Page ................................................................10 Create the Feedback Page ....................................................................................13 Packaging and Distributing the Template................................................................13 Installing a Template Package.................................................................................14 Creating a New template Project .............................................................................14 Appendix One: .xwd Syntax ....................................................................................16

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Introduction
Xerte supports a powerful workflow for creating, distributing and using dynamic templates.Developers can easily create dynamic templates that are driven by xml data. The template will read in the xml data and script in the template will dynamically produce the required content as the template runs. The template is entirely self-contained: a new instance of the template only requires changes to the xml file. As editing xml by hand is not for everyone, Xerte also makes it easy to createa wizard to edit the xml file using friendly controls. For example, consider a simple quiz. The quiz contains a number of questions, and each question contains a number of different options. Some of those options are correct and some are incorrect. All of the data for the quiz is held in an xml file. When the template is designed, we do not know how many questions are in the quiz, how many optionseach question might have, or which options for each question are correct. The template must read in the xml file and create the content based on the information it finds there. Xerte makes this quite straightforward. With a template created, the only thing that needs to change each time you want a new version of the template is the content in the xml file. This is much easier than adapting anentire Xerte project for re-use. The xml file contains only the information that might change each time. The Xerte template contains the logic that never changes. By separating these two elements, re-use is far simpler. As changing the xml by hand requires a degree of technical skill, and in any case is error prone. Xerte allows you to easily create a wizard that will edit the xml file for you. Thisis done by creating a type of style sheet that accompanies the xml file, and allows Xerte to dynamically create the required wizard. This greatly simplifies the effort involved in creating friendly wizards for each template you create. In this document we’ll look at a simple example that will help get you up and running with Xerte’s templates quickly. You’ll soon see that the workflow is quite...