The Orbeon Forms Blog

Orbeon Forms allows you to manage your web forms' entire lifecycle, and run your forms on-premises or in the cloud, with a focus on security and compliance.

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

Form Runner Wizard View

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

Simplify your queries with Oracle's dense_rank

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

Orbeon Forms 4.0 M17

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

Orbeon Forms 4.0 M16

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

Variables in XForms 2

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

Orbeon Forms 4.0 M15

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

Simplifying and improving XForms in Form Builder

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

Orbeon Forms 4.0 M14

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