The Orbeon Forms Blog

The autocomplete is a quite powerful but also fairly involved component. We’ve looked at how form authors use the autocomplete in Orbeon Forms, and found that in most cases they use it as an alternative to a combo box or radio buttons, for cases where the number of items to... More

Recently we made a proposal to the XForms working group to help reduce the size of XForms code. The XForms syntax is XML-based. When designing an XML vocabulary, it’s often hard to choose between using elements or attributes. XForms has historically leaned toward using more nested elements [1], which tend to add more markup... More

You’re looking at a project on GitHub, say Orbeon Forms, and would like to do a search in that project. GitHub provides a search field, but it searches through everything on GitHub, not just the current project you’re looking at. This unless you click on the Advanced Search icon, in Search for select Code,... More

We just implemented a performance enhancement when using JavaScript from XForms, in particular from XBL components. In Orbeon Forms, you typically call client-side JavaScript from actions with the <xxf:script> extension action or with <xf:action type=”javascript”> (which is now the preferred way). For example, the Currency XBL component has a call like this: <xxf:script>  YAHOO.xbl.fr.Currency.instance(this).setfocus();</xxf:script> Until now... More

For as far as we can remember, we've been getting variants of the following question: "Does XForms, as a technology, really have a future? I wonder, as I don't see browsers making any moves to implement it." When considering technologies, it is reasonable to worry about their future. But why... More

We are happy to announce the release of Orbeon Forms 3.9.1 Professional Edition (PE). This release is a stable update to Orbeon Forms 3.9.0 PE. It includes over 40 bug-fixes and select low-risk features. For more information, see the full list of changes. Orbeon Forms 3.9.1 PE is available immediately from the downloads page.... More

Orbeon Forms has supported rich text editing for the longest time, leveraging the YUI 2 RTE. However, depending on your situation, the RTE isn't always the best editor. For instance, it doesn't support <p> and instead uses <br>, by design. Also, it can't be use on iPads and iPhones, despite... More

When a form is first shown to users, text fields are often empty. So why not use that space, to provide some useful information? For instance, the Yahoo! Registration page leverages this technique: “First name” or “Last name”, in this example, are often referred to as placeholders, and they disappear... More

This is the second and last part of “The state of Orbeon Forms, Part 10”, covering the changes that have taken place since the release of Orbeon Forms 3.9 (part 1 is available here). This time we focus on Form Builder and Form Runner improvements: Form Builder Access control for deployed forms. When... More

NOTE: Orbeon Forms 3.9 CE and PE were released in May 2011. This is a major release with lots of improvements. You might want to check what’s new in that version first. A lot has been going on since the last “The state of Orbeon Forms” post! This means that this new... More