XForms/Formatting Numbers

Motivation You want the view portion of your form to add formatting information to numbers. For example, you want your US currency to be stored in the model as 12345.6789 but the view to display at $12,345.68. Note that the dollar sign is used as a prefix, commas are added and the decimal is rounded to two digits. Ideally, we would like to use a simple CSS function to indicate that all currency should be formatted using the standard number picture formats such as "$#,###.##". Method If all browsers supported the XPath 2.0 format-number() function, this would be trivial. Till then the developer will need to resort to workaround such as using JavaScript and the XML Binding language (XBL). Sample Code <xf:bind nodeset="instance('invoice')/Total" calculate="round((instance('invoice')/Tax + instance('invoice')/SubTotal) * 100) div 100"/> References Mozilla page on XForms custom controls The following discussions on the XForms mailing lists might be helpful. Dan McCreary's Post to the Mozilla XForms discussion group John Boyer's Comments on Number Formatting in XForms acknowledgement of the currency format needs in the 2001 working draft of XForms Output and Links Conditional Styling