The Orbeon Forms Blog

PDF icon by Double-J Design In addition to saving data to a database, Orbeon Forms can submit (or send) data to external services. If you just want to send the captured data as XML, it is very easy: Add the built-in "Send" or "Submit" button Configure the URL of the... More

When using formulas or custom components with Orbeon Forms, there is often a need to access information about the current form, such as: What is the current form name? If this component currently running at design-time in Form Builder? Is the form in read-only mode? Is the form data currently valid? Is... More

When you create a form with Form Builder and use Orbeon Forms’ implementation of the persistence API for relational databases, data collected by the form at runtime is stored in a set of 4 generic predefined tables. The tables are generic in the sense that they are not form-specific. This has a... More

A very important underlying feature of Orbeon Forms is the grid. A grid groups controls in rows and columns, and can optionally repeat rows. When we first implemented grids many years ago, we used tables for the underlying HTML markup. In HTML, tables serve two main purpose: Presenting tabular data (which... More

Orbeon Forms’s toolbox, which presents the choice of form controls available when you build a form, is fully customizable. Each form control points to a file containing information about the control and, in the case of custom controls (also known as components), the behavior of the control itself. Some components... More

JSON is the most popular format for browser/server communication. It is used more and more for all types of web services and as time goes it becomes more and more likely that you will encounter web services based on JSON rather than XML. So Orbeon Forms had to support JSON,... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 2016.1! This release comes with lots of new features and bug-fixes (in fact more than we had initially planned). We hope you’ll like them! NOTE: This release was formerly referred to as Orbeon Forms 4.11. You can read more on the new versioning scheme further... More

Consider the following 3 different actions a user could take while on a form: Entering a new value in a field and tabbing out of that field. Pressing the save button. Pressing the submit button. Each action will have an effect. For instance: When entering a new value, that new... More

With Orbeon Forms, all form controls share certain properties, like the control name. However, some controls take additional properties which are specific to them and which you set at design time in Form Builder. For instance the Dynamic Data Dropdown and Autocomplete controls take: a resource URL XPath expressions to retrieve... More

Form Builder allows you to change a control, grid or section’s settings by opening a dialog. This is generally good but when you want to quickly change settings for several controls, opening and closing dialogs can be a little frustrating! To help with this, we just implemented Previous / Next... More