The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

Photo by buschap Following up on changes making the upload control safer, we recently committed improvements to cryptography-related features within Orbeon Forms. Orbeon Forms doesn’t rely very much on encryption in the first place. That’s because a lot of information is created and stays on the server, without ever making it... More

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M9 (Milestone 9). Like 4.0 M8 and the previous milestones this is not a final release. We have addressed the following issues in this build: Form Runner Not found error with noscript error summary (#405) Summary page: form title/description no longer shown (#408) Error summary uses improved "visited"... More

Photo by ladyvee9 Back when we started Orbeon we didn’t have to think too much about which technology to choose given our background: Java was cool then, it was king on the server, and we had worked with it before it even reached version 1.0. But that was maybe the last time we didn’t... More