The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1)! Like 4.0 Beta 3 and the previous milestone builds this is not a final release, but we are really getting there! Here is the overall list of changes since Beta 3: Form Builder Edit Source: don't allow empty document (#815) IE9:... More

We just added a new sample form as part of our process of testing Orbeon Forms 4.0 beta builds. This is the W-9 form, which is a common US form to request a taxpayer identification number. In the browser It shows a number of features, including: the (new in 4.0)... More

Today we released the third Beta release of Orbeon Forms 4.0! Like 4.0 Beta 2 and the previous milestone builds this is not a final release. In this release, we fixed some more IE 7 issues, improved Section Templates, the Wizard, and XML Schema generation, and more. Here is the overall... More

With XForms, you use XPath expressions to specify complex validation constraints and calculations. Take the following XML snippet: <item> <units>3</units> <price>50</price> <total/> </item> You can declaratively calculate the total like this: <xf:bind ref="total" calculate="../units * ../price"/> ../units and ../price are paths that refer to the XML elements with those names.... More