The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

With Orbeon Forms 4.5, we are introducing several improvements to the Review mode and the PDF output. Selection controls We used to output all selection controls like this: Single selection: output the selected item’s label. Multiple selection: output all selected items’ labels with separators. Boolean input: output “true” or “false”.... More

Rationale If you're reading this, you're most likely already familiar with the properties-local.xml file used to configure Orbeon Forms. This file typically goes inside the Orbeon Forms web app, in WEB-INF/resources/config. What if you'd like to package a single war for Orbeon Forms, and deploy that war on multiple servers... More

Orbeon Forms 4.5 introduces two features related to repeated content, discussed in other posts: Inserting and reordering grid rows Repeated sections Work on these enhancements also benefits the Form Builder Choices editor [1], and you can now reorder choices and have control over where to insert new ones: Reordering choices... More

As we were recently fixing a few issues with the Dropdown Menu control, we started thinking more seriously about the behavior of that control in Form Builder and Form Runner, and it turned out to be interesting! The questions revolve around the special item at the top of the list,... More

What versioning does Form versioning is an important new feature in Orbeon Forms 4.5. In the past, Orbeon Forms was only keeping track of one form definition for every published form. This meant that if you republished a form, the previous form definition was overwritten. It also meant that when... More

With Form Builder, form authors can provide a help message for every form field, and we recently discussed how we improved the visual appearance of help messages. For radio buttons and checkboxes, it sometimes make sense to have a message targeting a specific radio button or checkbox, as done in this... More

We have just implemented a new Duplicate button, available on the Summary page of both Form Builder and Form Runner. This button allows you to copy: an existing form definition, when used from Form Builder existing form data, when used from deployed forms This enables some often-requested use cases, including:... More