The Orbeon Forms Blog

This is the Orbeon Forms blog. Stay up to date with the latest releases and new features of Orbeon Forms!

Orbeon Forms 4.0 RC1

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

New sample form: W-9

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

Orbeon Forms 4.0 Beta 3

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

Better formulas with XPath type annotations

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

Orbeon Forms 4.0 Beta 2

Today we released the second Beta release of Orbeon Forms 4.0! Like 4.0 Beta and the previous milestone builds this is not a final release. In this release, we fixed a number of Internet Explorer issues (in particular for IE 7, which we don’t recommend to use but which we still... More

Orbeon Forms 4.0 Beta

Today we released the first Beta release of Orbeon Forms 4.0! Like 4.0 M19 and the previous milestone builds this is not a final release. We have addressed lots of issues in this Beta release, covering Form Builder, Form Runner, Liferay support, and more. We also addressed a bunch of UI... More

Automatic remapping of Windows-1252 characters to Unicode

Nowadays, almost everything uses Unicode, which supports a large (very large!) number of characters. Unicode assign a code (number) to each character, and in most cases this code is represented with: With UTF-16 when in memory (e.g. in Java and Windows since NT); With UTF-8 when sent over the wire.... More

Orbeon Forms 4.0 M19

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M19 (Milestone 19). Like 4.0 M18 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. In this release, the following issues were addressed: Form Builder Copy/paste of control loses translation (#625) Enable XPath type annotations by default in Builder (#630) When creating a new... More

Creating REST services with Google Apps Script

There are times when you'd like to create a service, want the service to be available publicly, and want to do this quickly, maybe for testing or for a demo you're putting together. In those cases, Google Apps Script might just be the solution you're looking for. As an example,... More

Orbeon Forms 4.0 M18

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M18 (Milestone 18). Like 4.0 M17 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. In this release, the following issues were addressed: Form Builder Form Builder should use logo specified in oxf.fr.default-logo.uri (#616) Permissions dialog layout scrambled (#570) Hover over button doesn't show... More