The Orbeon Forms Blog

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M13 (Milestone 13). Like 4.0 M12 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. The last milestone introduced two big changes. M13 instead doesn't add anything big but focuses on fixing a series of issues: Form Builder Form Builder removes fr:buttons (#423) Section template crashes (#516)... More

For the longest time, we’ve been helping people posting questions about Orbeon Forms on Twitter. For questions that fit in 140 characters, and can be answered by an equally short message, Twitter is a great medium. Both questions and answers have to be short; this creates an expectation of those... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M12 (Milestone 12). Like 4.0 M11 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. This milestone is a rather big one, as we have just merged in (more than 170 commits!) a couple of major changes we have been working on since June: A new Form... More

Form Builder is all about enabling form authors to create forms with a web-based tool, without having to write code. But then, in what format are the forms you create with Form Builder saved? Is it similar to when editing a document in Word, where your document is saved in... More

Photo by Sebastian Bergmann We started implementing regular code reviews at Orbeon a while back, and to our great satisfaction the practice has stuck! How do we do code reviews, concretely? Some companies have very drastic processes in place. For example, they won’t allow anything into their master branch without a... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M11 (Milestone 11). Like 4.0 M10 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. We have addressed the following issues in this build: Form Builder Can't reset max repeat to None (#433) Don't generate type="xs:string|xf:string" on binds (#445) Form Runner Oracle flat view incorrectly contains null values... More

Compared to general purpose languages, XForms and tools like Form Builder provide higher level abstractions tailored for a specific job: creating forms. When you can implement your validation logic in a declarative way, does it instead make sense to program it in JavaScript, adapt that JavaScript to run on all... More

Image by M. H. Stephens Until recently, we hadn’t updated the Orbeon Forms controller (called the Page Flow Controller or PFC) in a long time. First, it had served us pretty well for many years. Second, the architecture of the controller made it hard to implement certain changes. But in June we did... More

The two pillars of XForms debugging are the XForms inspector and the Orbeon log: The inspector, pictured below, allows you to see changes to your XForms instances right from your web browser, as you interact with the form. Logging is done on the server, to a file generally referred to... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M10 (Milestone 10). Like 4.0 M9 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. We have addressed the following issues in this build: Form Runner Don't allow "dot" in app/form name in page flow PDF template: support output of file metadata for file attachments XForms engine... More