The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

In forms parlance, a required field is a field which must contain a value, or else the form will show an error and you won’t be able to save it or submit it. This is a pretty fundamental idea, and both XForms and HTML5 even include a way to mark... More

A while back, we explained how and why we greatly simplified the list of data types in Form Builder, and we wrote: We have reflected this in Form Builder by putting the decimal type at the top and the double type at the bottom, and we might even remove it... More

Orbeon Forms has a Number field which allows you to enter integer or decimal numbers, but until now this field didn’t particularly help users enter numbers efficiently on a smartphone or tablet without a physical keyboard. But we thought we could do better, since iOS has the ability to show... More