Web Application Oriented Electronic Frorm System

The goal of electronic form technology is to enable exchange of data among enterprises, replace traditional paper-based trade documents and construct an efficient, exact and reliable web-based e-trade system. Electronic form system is a subsystem of e-trade system, which implements visualization design, automatic generation and dynamic publication of electronic form. Electronic form system plays an important role in the whole e-trade system. It is significant to design and implement an electronic form system.Preliminary design of electronic form system is first introduced in the thesis, which divides the whole system into five functional modules such as data extraction, content design, appearance design, form generation and form publication. Based on the analysis of use case diagram the outer interface of each module and the implementation technology of the system are selected and analyzed.The tool for visualization design of electronic form is an important part of electronic form system, which implements form content design, style design and automatic generation. The thesis analyzes display model, working model and XML format. The advantage of JAVA as the implementation technology is platform independence of the tool.PDF is the most appropriate format of electronic form, which ensures unified form appearance on heterogeneous platforms. In order to generate electronic form in PDF format a general PDF software toolkit is developed. The toolkit is based on PDF specification 1.3 and has good expansibility and usability.Electronic form can be published not only in the format of PDF, but also in the format of HTML, WML and so on. The thesis presents multi-channel publication of electronic form, which transforms XML format into HTML, WML and PDF format through XSLT technology. This satisfies different requirements of electronic form consumers.