The Orbeon Forms Blog

Orbeon Forms allows you to manage your web forms' entire lifecycle, and run your forms on-premises or in the cloud, with a focus on security and compliance.

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

PostgreSQL support in Orbeon Forms

According to the DB-Engines database ranking by popularity, the top 5 relational databases are: Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and DB2. In 4.6 we added support for SQL Server. The upcoming 4.8 adds support for PostgreSQL, thus completing Orbeon Forms support for the top-5 relational databases. Past the top-5, we... More

Orbeon Forms 4.7

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.7! Major features and enhancements Server-side embedding API. Orbeon Forms 4.7 introduces a new way to integrate forms within Java (and other Java Virtual Machine-based languages) applications: server-side embedding. (doc, blog) Internal service requests. Orbeon Forms often needs to perform requests to itself, such as calling its... More