The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.2! The defining feature of Orbeon Forms 4.2 is support for more powerful Form Runner buttons. Buttons can now be configured in a much more flexible way to trigger simple sequential processes to execute when the user presses a button. See the blog post for an introduction... More

When you create a form with Form Builder, behind the scene, data entered by users in the form is collected in an XML document. That same XML document is sent to the persistence API, and if you are using one of the built-in implementations of the persistence API, that XML... More