The Orbeon Forms Blog

We often get questions that result from a confusion between the roles of the Form Builder Summary page, and the Form Runner Home page. The confusion comes from both pages listing forms you've created with Form Builder. To put it simply: The Form Builder Summary page shows form you can... More

Orbeon Forms 4.6 improves the performance and usability of the Form Runner Home page. The Form Runner Home page As a reminder, the Form Runner home page has two purposes: For regular users, it is a start page which lists the forms available to the user and allows navigation to... More

Starting with version 4.6, Orbeon Forms will support SQL Server, in addition to Oracle, MySQL, and DB2. That's a lot of databases to test for. To make testing easier, we've started using Amazon RDS. RDS does for databases what Sauce did for browsers: it allows us to run on every... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.5.1 PE. This is a bug-fix update for Orbeon Forms PE only. We recommend this update for all Orbeon Forms 4.5 users. For more details about the 4.5 release in general, see Orbeon Forms 4.5. This release includes the following fixes: Form Builder Control/section settings... More

A small change coming in Orbeon Forms 4.6 is the ability to set inline configuration property values. Orbeon Forms uses properties for a lot of its configuration. For example, to set which standard buttons appear in a form: <property as="xs:string" name="oxf.fr.detail.buttons.orbeon.controls" value="refresh pdf wizard-prev wizard-next review"/> When a property value... More

Starting with version 4.6, Orbeon Forms will support SQL Server. This is in addition to Oracle, MySQL, and DB2, which have been supported for a while now. Adding support for SQL Server was not as large an endeavor as one might think, this mostly thanks to the work we have... More

Orbeon Forms prior to version 4.4 used to display full dates and times in the Summary page: Full dates We didn’t like this because the resulting dates and times took a lot of precious space on screen. One way to solve this is to indicate relative dates such as “3... More

Abstract As most sophisticated web apps, Orbeon Forms has to deal with lots of asynchronous events in the browser, like Ajax requests, timers, and user interactions. We'll go over a real-life example of logic involving several asynchronous events, see the difficulty involved in implementing it with observers, and explore 3... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.5! Major features This release is rich in new features and enhancements: IE11 support. Both Form Builder and deployed forms now work with with IE11. Versioning of form definitions. Publishing a form definition doesn't overwrite the previously published form definition, but creates a new version of it.... More

Rationale A few weeks ago, we've seen how you can store Orbeon Forms configurations, in particular the properties-local.xml, outside of the Orbeon Forms war file. We've seen how this allows you to have a single war you deploy on all your environments, and keep differences in configurations between these environments... More