The Orbeon Forms Blog

Recently, we implemented support for run modes in Orbeon Forms. The idea is not new and it comes down to this: sometimes you want to run Orbeon Forms with development settings, and sometimes with production settings. So far, to achieve this, you had to play with your properties-local.xml file, either... More

Who can do what with Form Builder? You guessed it: in this post, we’ll discuss access control, as it relates to Form Builder. More specifically, that question has two facets: When it comes to people using Form Builder to create or edit forms, often referred to as form authors, who... More

Photo by preservationgal In a previous post, we covered the basics of controls bindings, where XPath expressions are used to bind a control to XML elements. But it’s not always that simple, is it? So now is the time to cover all the cases you can encounter with binding expressions. First, there... More

Photo by Philippa Willitts Take the most basic HTML input field: <input name="nickname"> Then, compare to the equivalent XForms: <xforms:input ref="nickname"> Both look pretty much the same, right? Well yes, but only on the surface! In HTML, you just specify a name, which is later used by form submission (or to... More

For every form you create with Form Builder, after you deploy the form, Orbeon Forms exposes two pages: A new page, which end users go to to fill out the form. When a form is filled out and saved, it creates what we refer to as form data. A summary... More

XForms 1.1 makes a distinction between two commonly-used attributes: ref and nodeset. Both are binding attributes, and they hold an XPath expression pointing to zero, one or more XML element or attribute nodes: ref points to a single node ("single-node binding"). Its most frequent use is to bind a control such as xforms:input to XML data. nodeset points to... More

XForms has a rather powerful feature called repeats, which allows form authors to easily create forms with sets of fields that can occur multiple times. Repeats have always been supported by the XForms engine in Orbeon Forms, and now, they can also be used directly from Form Builder. For instance, consider... More

You might not have heard about it, but XForms supports asynchronous submissions since version 1.1. In fact, XForms 1.1 even made the asynchronous behavior the default, probably because in the browser XMLHttpRequest is asynchronous. [1] So what does it mean for an XForms submission to be asynchronous? Simply that sending the submission... More

Back in February, we were telling you about the new TinyMCE component. Since then, we have made a couple of important improvements to this component: It is now used in Form Builder when you insert an HTML text control, instead of the YUI RTE. The screenshot below shows what the... More

Contrary to what the title might suggest, this isn’t a post on personal productivity or self-realization! Instead, we will be talking about keyboard focus. We recently made a number of improvements to focus handling in Orbeon Forms, on two fronts: The XForms engine is more aware of which control owns... More