The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

Review and PDF improvements

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

Storing configurations outside of the Orbeon Forms war file

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

Choices editor improvements

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

Fun with dropdown menu titles

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

Form versioning

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

Hints for checkboxes and radio buttons

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

The new Duplicate button

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

Improving how we show help messages

Before Orbeon Forms 4.5, we’ve been using modal dialogs to show help messages. This was a rather heavy handed approach which prevented users from filling out the field while seeing the help message. Now, help messages show using a Bootstrap popover shown next to the relevant field, as shown in the... More

Orbeon Forms 4.4.1 PE

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.4.1 PE. This is a bug-fix update for Orbeon Forms PE only. For more details about the 4.4 release in general, see Orbeon Forms 4.4. This release includes the following fixes: Orbeon Forms 4.4 requires additional jars for Oracle (#1484) IE10: section content is partially... More

Repeated sections

In addition to repeated grid rows, Form Builder and Form Runner now support repeated section content. Repeating section content is very similar to repeating a group of grid rows, except that the entire section content can be repeated. This includes nested grids and subsections. You enable content repetition in the... More