The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

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

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

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

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