The Orbeon Forms Blog

One of the cool new features of Orbeon Forms 4.0 is the wizard view. By default with Form Runner all the form sections appear in the same page, on top of each other. If your form is large that means that you have to scroll to fill out the entire... More

Data persistence for forms created with Form Builder is done through a REST API. You can implement that API, or use one of the provided implementations. Orbeon’s implementation for relational databases, for now specifically MySQL and Oracle, always uses inserts instead of doing updates or deletes1. For this, tables have... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M17 (Milestone 17). Like 4.0 M16 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. Due to the Thanksgiving break, M17 is a rather small update, but it happens to contain two important new bits: a new landing page for the Form Runner and... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M16 (Milestone 16). Like 4.0 M15 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. In M16, we addressed the following issues: Form Builder FB: cut to clipboard fails if fr-form-binds id is missing (#579) FB: tabbing out of field reaches delete icon... More

Orbeon Forms has long supported exposing XPath variables with the xxforms:variable extension [1]: <xxforms:variable name="answer" value="42"/> So it’s great that XForms 2 now standardizes variables with the new xforms:var element! The above example becomes: <xforms:var name="answer" value="42"/> The working group went with var for concision (not to mention that the... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M15 (Milestone 15). Like 4.0 M14 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. In M15, we have decided to address a number of smaller issues, including a lot of polishing: Form Builder Section help doesn't save (#552) Don't show icons to... More

Behind the scene, Form Builder manipulates XForms. Hence, to a great extend, the features provided by the builder are heavily influence by how things are done in XForms, and there often is a direct mapping from a Form Builder feature to an XForms capability. Along the way, we took the... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M14 (Milestone 14). Like 4.0 M13 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. M14 addresses the following issues: Form Builder Rename control in repeat: instance other subsequent iterations disappear (#541) Required fields don't show as required in Edit Validation Properties dialog (#542) User can add... More

Recently, while doing a round of profiling, we found out that event processing on the Form Runner summary page when paging and searching was taking a long time to execute (in the order of hundreds of milliseconds). So we set to improve this. In XForms as in plain HTML, event... More

Orbeon Forms 4.0 comes with a new Form Settings dialog (which you open from the top right of the builder), where you can change the form’s application and form names, as well as update its title and description. In addition to the form’s basic information, we have added a Form... More