The Orbeon Forms Blog

This is the Orbeon Forms blog. Stay up to date with the latest releases and new features of Orbeon Forms!

Importing date and time fields from Excel files

The Excel import feature now supports importing date and time formats. Excel cells that contain values formatted as date/time, date, or time in the Excel spreadsheet are automatically converted to their respective ISO formats before being stored as form data. This makes them available in your form for viewing, editing, and... More

Showing all lease messages inline, for consistency

In Orbeon Forms 2017.2 we introduced the lease feature, which is useful in cases where you need to have multiple users edit the same form data, and want to ensure that only one user does so at a given time, this to avoid any risk of conflicts with concurrent edits. We... More

Orbeon Forms 2019.1.1 PE

Today we released Orbeon Forms 2019.1.1 PE! This update to Orbeon Forms 2019.1 PE contains bug-fixes and is recommended for all Orbeon Forms 2019.1 PE users. For details, see the complete release notes. You can download the latest versions of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page. We hope you enjoy... More

Upgrading to TinyMCE 5

In Form Builder, when you add a Formatted Text Area field to a form, under the hood Orbeon Forms uses the TinyMCE library. For Orbeon Forms 2020.1, we've upgraded TinyMCE to version 5. TinyMCE 5 provides better accessibility, stricter WCAG 2.1 compliance, and more. While we were at it, we've... More

Orbeon Forms 2019.2

Today we released Orbeon Forms 2019.2 PE and Orbeon Forms 2019.2 CE, our second and final major release of 2019! This release includes landscape PDF mode, fluid layout in the browser, and date/time support for the Excel import feature. We closed over 180 issues since Orbeon Forms 2019.1. For details,... More

Keeping our code current

Orbeon Forms works in part in the web browser (the “client”) and in part on the server. Both sides communicate together via HTTP and what is known as “AJAX”. Simply put, it’s a way to exchange information between both parties. Now it turns out that the client-side code related to this part... More

Orbeon Forms 2018.2.4 PE

Today we released Orbeon Forms 2018.2.4 PE! This update to Orbeon Forms 2018.2.3 PE contains bug-fixes and is recommended for all Orbeon Forms 2018.2.x PE users. For details, see the complete release notes. You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page. We hope you enjoy... More

New layout choices for PDF and browser views

Form Runner produces automatic PDF files in US letter portrait format by default. It is possible, with custom CSS, to change that default, but this is not extremely convenient. With the upcoming Orbeon Forms 2019.2, you can set the PDF page size and orientation directly with the Form Builder Form... More

Orbeon Forms 2019.1

Today we released Orbeon Forms 2019.1 PE and Orbeon Forms 2019.1 CE! This release is packed with new features and enhancements which should help form authors and form users be more productive, including non-repeated grid settings, renaming of control references in formulas, improved dropdowns, and much more. We closed over 180... More

Making authentication easier with a new built-in user menu, login and logout pages

In cases you need users accessing Orbeon Forms to be authenticated, if you decide to have that authentication done by your web container, the latter needs to be configured with: A login page, where users enter their username and password, which is then checked by the web container before it lets... More