The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

Orbeon Forms 4.9

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.9! Major features and enhancements Form Builder New control for showing explanatory text. Lots of forms require explanations, often inline with form fields. Until now, you had to use workarounds to do this in Form Builder, such as using a Text Output field with an HTML... More

Automatic web links in PDF files

Orbeon Forms can automatically produce nice PDF files without any extra work (see the documentation). While PDFs are useful for printing and archival, they also have a few smarter features. For example, web links in a PDF file can be made clickable, and this is something that Orbeon Forms leverages:... More

Adding explanatory text to your forms

Some forms are complex, and form authors want to provide guidance to the end-users who will be filling out those forms. For every field, in addition to a label, form authors can provide: A hint, shown below the field. Using a hint works well for short pieces of information that fit... More

Orbeon Forms 4.8.2

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.8.2 PE. This update to Orbeon Forms 4.8 PE contains bug-fixes and is recommended for all Orbeon Forms 4.8 PE users. Specifically, this release addresses the following issues since version 4.8.1: Form Builder XBL template bind attribute prefix/namespace lost when control inserted (#2095) Form Runner... More

New wizard validated mode

The Form Runner wizard view is widely used by Orbeon Forms users: it presents a simple, navigable view of a form’s top-level sections, shown as separate pages. Until recently, the wizard view only supported free navigation. In this mode, you can freely navigate between pages, independently from whether there are... More

Orbeon Forms 4.8.1

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.8.1 PE. This update to Orbeon Forms 4.8 PE contains bug-fixes and is recommended for all Orbeon Forms 4.8 PE users. Specifically, this release addresses the following issues: Form Builder Incorrect label edited upon insert of XBL with nested labels (#2075) Form Runner Error when... More

Saying goodbye to internal HTTP connections

Orbeon Forms often needs to perform calls to itself, for example to: call persistence layer implementations, load internationalized resources, navigate between pages, proxy requests for dynamic XForms resources, and request CSS, JavaScript and image assets when producing PDFs. In previous versions, Orbeon Forms performed actual HTTP connections on itself. This... More

Choosing the best versioning option when publishing a form

Orbeon Forms supports versioning of form definitions since Orbeon Forms 4.5 [1]. Since Orbeon Forms 4.6 [2], Form Builder also allows you to control whether a new form definition version must be created: Creating a new version Or whether the last existing form definition version must be overwritten: Overwriting an... More

Orbeon Forms 4.8

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.8! Major features and enhancements PostgreSQL support. Thanks in good part to an external contribution, Orbeon Forms supports PostgreSQL in addition to Oracle, MySQL, SQLServer, DB2 and eXist. (blog, #1941) Better management of server resources. Under load, Orbeon Forms limits the number of concurrent form processing requests... More

Orbeon Forms 4.7.1

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.7.1 PE. This update to Orbeon Forms 4.7 PE contains bug-fixes, security fixes, performance improvements, and localization improvements. We recommend this update for all Orbeon Forms 4.7 PE users. Specifically, this release addresses the following issues: Form Builder Renaming an action duplicates it (#1913) FB... More