Users invest significant time and effort in filling out forms, so losing any data ranges from mildly annoying to catastrophic. As engineers, we often focus on technical failures that can cause data loss. What if a server running Orbeon Forms goes down? (Solution: clustering.) What if users experience intermittent connectivity with the server? (Solution: retries.)
Often, however, data loss results from human behavior rather than technical failure. A common case is overwriting data by mistake. For example, a user might open the same form in two browser tabs and unknowingly save in one tab, overwriting changes made in the other. A similar situation can occur when two users unknowingly edit the same data. To address this, we’ve added automatic conflict detection: Orbeon Forms warns you before you overwrite data that has changed since you last loaded it.
This complements other safeguards that help prevent data loss, such as background autosave, granting users a lease on specific form data to prevent concurrent edits, and warnings when closing a tab or navigating away from a form with unsaved changes. This feature will ship with Orbeon Forms 2025.1, which we plan to release at the end of this year.