EFX Toolkit for Java Developers

The EfxExpressionTranslator class is intended to translate EFX expressions to any target scripting language. It extends the EfxBaseListener generated by ANTLR4, and uses the EfxLexer and EfxParser to process any given EFX expression.

To enable translation to different target scripting languages, it relies on implementations of the SymbolResolver and ScriptGenerator interfaces. The SymbolResolver is responsible for resolving field names to their metadata (XPaths, data types etc.). The ScriptGenerator is responsible for providing the target scripting language’s syntax for a set of common expressions (performing calculations, logical operations, string concatenation etc.).

The EfxTemplateTranslator extends the EfxExpressionTranslator to add the capability of transpiling EFX templates to a target markup language.

Apart from the dependencies of its base class, the EfxTemplateTranslator relies on implementations of the MarkupGenerator interface to provide the target markup language’s syntax for specific parts of the final output (rendering content blocks, labels, variables, etc.).

The EFX Toolkit contains the XPathScriptGenerator class which is an implementation of the ScriptGenerator interface that targets XPath. Most implementations should be able to rely on XPath for resolving field values since the input data for eForms applications are in XML. However, if you need to target a different runtime environment (for example JavaScript for client-side validation) you can implement the ScriptGenerator interface in your own class. This will allow you to reuse the provided EfxExpressionTranslator, and retarget it to the scripting language of your choice with minimal effort.

An implementation of the MarkupGenerator interface that targets XSLT can also be found in the Notice Viewer sample application (XslMarkupGenerator). For other target markup languages you can implement the interface in your own class so that you can reuse the existing EfxTemplateTranslator.

Finally, an implementation of the SymbolResolver interface that uses directly the eForms SDK can also be found in the Notice Viewer Sample application. If however, you organise the eForms metadata provided with the SDK to your own custom metadata repository, then you can implement the same interface in your own class and reuse the existing translators.

Implementing these three interfaces (or reusing the existing ones) should be enough for you to be able to translate EFX expressions and templates for your target runtime environment. For more details on implementing these interfaces follow this link.

The EFX Toolkit is designed to be used with all versions of the eForms SDK starting from version 0.6.0. To make the selection of the required version of the SDK for each transpilation call, the EfxTranslator class is provided. It’s purpose is to make the whole complexity of loading and using the correct metadata transparent to the developer. You only need to pass the version number of the SDK that you need as a parameter to each transpilation call. The eForms SDK version number used to create a specific notice for example can be found inside the <cbc:CustomizationID> tag inside the notice XML. If you pass this to the transpiler, the proper version of the SDK will be used automatically to process the notice.

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