The Orbeon Forms Blog

Photo by Keoni Cabral Up to version 4.1, Orbeon Forms had a few configurable buttons to specify what happens with form data: The “Save” button saves data to the database. The “Submit” button saves data and shows a dialog after saving (with options to clear data, keep data, navigate to... More

Since Orbeon Forms 4.0, Form Builder provides a UI allowing form authors to define who can do what on the forms they create, once they are published. For each role, form authors can define which function users can perform. The functions are create, read, update, and delete (CRUD). In 4.0,... More

You often need to monitor HTTP requests, be it from your browser to the server, or from the server to backend services. You can setup Orbeon Forms to log the body of Ajax requests and responses, as well as the body of requests and responses Orbeon Forms makes to backend... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.1 M1, a milestone build for the upcoming Orbeon Forms 4.1 release. This is not a stable release. Here is the list of changes since 4.0.1: Form Builder Ability to enter HTML labels and hints in the builder (#870) Introduce a distinction between the 'read'... More

Photo by hide99 During the Orbeon Forms 4 development cycle, we released over 20 intermediate builds (including milestones, betas, and a release candidate - you can see them all here). More often than not, we released one build per week. We have found that doing so was extremely positive: It helps... More

We've written before about the importance of having a set of comprehensive unit tests for Orbeon Forms. For instance, we put in place the necessary infrastructure to test code in Scala back in 2011 and to test XML pipelines back in 2005. With this, every time a check-in is made,... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0.1, a bug-fix and performance release. Here is the list of changes since 4.0.0: Form Builder Open/close state of existing sections is lost when inserting new sections (#177) Itemset editor: fixup label/value if needed (#830) Close large form sections upon load to improve performance (#838)... More

Say you created two forms with Form Builder: a contact form and a phone call form. In the phone call form, you use one of the fields to capture the name of the person you'll have a call with. Instead of using a text field, you'd like to have a... More

After more than 2000 commits, 19 milestone builds, 3 betas, and one release candidate, we are proud to announce the final release of Orbeon Forms 4.0! As a goal for 4.0 we wanted to create a release we care about, on the outside as well as the inside. So in... More

Photo by Jason Pearce Consider the following XML document in an XForms instance: <xf:instance id="my-book"> <book id="simple_book"> <chapter id="chapter_1"> <title>Chapter 1</title> <para>Hello world!</para> </chapter> <chapter id="chapter_2"> ... </chapter> </book> </xf:instance> Some key elements in this document have id attributes which identify the element they are placed on. This means that if... More