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.

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

Detecting login pages in Ajax requests

Way back when, in Orbeon Forms 3.9, we introduced an improved retry mechanism that kicks in when an Ajax request to the server fails. A request might fail either because the browser didn’t get a response before a certain timeout, or because it got an unexpected response. In the first... More

Preventing cross-site request forgery (CSRF)

What is CSRF? Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) is a type of exploit of your web site whereby a malicious party may be able to perform operations posing as a given user of your site, without that user having authorized those operations, or even being aware they are performed. In a... More

Inserting and reordering grid rows

Grids are a key ingredient in Form Builder and Form Runner, as they are the main tool you use to layout controls on a page. And since Orbeon Forms 4 they are also repeatable, which means that you can repeat one or multiple row of the grid. We have just... More

Saving memory by removing unneeded whitespace

Photo by Brad Montgomery Orbeon Forms stores form definitions and form data in XML format. When using XML, it is customary to use new lines and indentation to make it easier for humans to read and write. Notice for example the following bit of empty form data: <book> <details> <title/> <author/>... More