The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

Form builder always had the ability to validate data using data types such as “string”, “integer”, “decimal”, “date”, “email”, and so on. Most (but not quite all) of the types available in Form Builder until now come from an XML specification called “XML Schema”. When we first implemented this feature in... More

A major new feature of the upcoming Orbeon Forms 4.3 is enhanced validation. Up to 4.2, you could validate a control value with: whether a value is required a data type such as "integer" or "email" a single XPath constraint If any of these validations failed, the user would get... More

Browser uploads have gone through a lot since the beginning of the web. It is now possible, with standard APIs, to perform uploads in the background, to obtain file metadata, and even to handle drag and drop of files. In Orbeon Forms 4.2, we improved file upload in a few... More