Copying and pasting across forms

You might already know that Orbeon Forms supports cut, copy, and paste operations for the following items:

• individual form controls
• grids of controls
• sections and their content

The cut and paste operations can be undone and redone with the "Undo"/"Redo" icons. All of this is available with the icon buttons at the top of the toolbox.


Before Orbeon Forms 2020.1, the cut/copy/paste operations were restricted to the currently running instance of Form Builder. They did not work between different Form Builder windows or tabs, or between edition sessions of the same form.

With Orbeon Forms 2020.1, we are improving this and these operations are now available between forms belonging to the same user session. For example, the following scenarios work:

• Copy an item, go back to the Form Builder Summary page, reopen the same form or open a different form, and paste the item just copied.
• Open several forms with Form Builder in different tabs or windows of the same browser (and the same browser user), and copy/paste items between these forms.

This allows more sharing between forms, including reusing parts of a form in other forms, copying sections from existing forms and pasting them into section templates for further reuse, and more.

We hope you will like this enhancement! See also the documentation.