The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

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