The Orbeon Forms Blog

XForms by itself doesn’t fully solve the question of how to persist data. It provides solid foundations that we can leverage to persist data, but intentionally doesn’t answer questions such as “how is the data organized?” or “how is data saved, retrieved, or searched, this in an actual database, say... More

Recently, a user asked us why, in Form Builder, there is a separate Number control in the toolbox. Is this the same as an Input Field set it to a Decimal datatype? Our answer was, unfortunately: “Not really!”. When you add a Number control, you are in fact adding an... More

In CoffeeScript, you can easily create an object and set the value of some of its properties: section = title: 'My section' element: $('.my-section') width: $('.my-section').width() The width property is used to cache the width of the body. But the way it is defined isn't ideal as $('body') is duplicated.... More

Glitches happen. While you’re filing a form, your browser might crash, your computer be disconnected from the power or run out of power, your Internet connection might go down, or the server might have a technical issue. When such a glitch happens, you’re likely to loose whatever work you’ve done... More

Many of us are familiar with using spreadsheets with rows and column of cells. Sometimes we also want to gather data in a form that behaves similar to a spreadsheet with data categorized in two dimensions using regular rows and columns. In some cases, the default behavior of XForms may... More

In most deployments of Orbeon Forms, there are two classes of users: Some users fill out forms; as done by constituents in the case of a government deployment. Some users can access all the submitted forms; as done by specific government employees in the case of a government deployment. This... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.3.1 PE. This is a bug-fix update for Orbeon Forms PE only. For more details about the 4.3 release in general, see Orbeon Forms 4.3. This release includes the following fixes: XPath error when setting database service action (#1228) fr:number processes but hides decimal part (#599)... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.3! This release is rich in new features: Form Builder and Form Runner Enhanced validation. You can set multiple validation constraints, each with its own alert message. In addition to errors, you can also create warnings and informational messages (blog post, doc). Owner/group-based permissions AKA "See your... More

Recently, we’ve been asked a number of questions relating to computing the sum of numbers in a form, whether with Form Builder or with plain XForms. This seems pretty simple, because XPath, the expression language used by Orbeon Forms, has a sum() function. But there can be some difficulties: Values... More

With Form Builder, you can easily design forms that take file attachments: Add a file attachment control to your form, for instance to allow users to attach a supporting document such as a PDF or Word document. If the file users need to attach is a picture, use the image... More