The Orbeon Forms Blog

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

If you’re creating a form only accessible by members of your organization, chances are you’re not worried about spammers. On the other hand, if your form is publicly available, and can be accessed anonymously, your form can easily become the target of spammers, hoping someone will read the content they... More

With mobile browsing on the rise, we set out to better support mobile devices in Orbeon Forms. We are particularly focused on tablets, as the larger real estate provided by those devices makes them more suitable than phone to fill out forms. And for now, we are doing most of... More

What should your application do when a error occurs? One approach is to let the application crash and burn (errors are not supposed to happen, right?). This behavior remains typical of many “native” (C/Objective-C/C++) desktop and mobile applications. Your only hope is that the app has some kind of autosave feature, or you... More

A pretty neat recent feature of Form Runner is the ability to import data from Excel files. In a few words this allows you to: upload an Excel file with header and data rows validate each row against the form's validation rules import all valid data rows into the persistence layer... More