• The Timestamp control
• The IBAN control

The Timestamp control is a simple readonly form control which allows showing an instant in time in the timezone of the user. Use cases include storing moments where a specific action happens, such as a last modification date, or the time a user approved or rejected a workflow action. The Timestamp control adds to the other date- and time-related form controls in Orbeon Forms.

The IBAN control allows users to enter an International Bank Account Number (IBAN). This control includes validation to ensure that the entered IBAN is valid.

This adds to other form controls such as the International Securities Identification Number (ISIN), the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), and the Social Security Number (SSN) controls.

Both form controls show in the standard Form Builder toolbox.

For more details, see the respective documentation for the Timestamp control and the IBAN control.

We hope you will enjoy this feature of Orbeon Forms 2025.1.1!

In addition, the Forms Admin and Published Forms pages are also available in dark mode.

You can enable the dark mode by default, or follow the user’s browser or system preference. For more, see the documentation.

We hope you will enjoy this feature of Orbeon Forms 2025.1!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

Whenever a user hits a form URL, the form definition is loaded from the database and processed, and the form is then rendered in the browser. This process can take a significant amount of time for forms with many fields. Because of this, Orbeon Forms always had a sophisticated cache mechanism so that a cached, pre-processed (compiled) form definition can be used for subsequent requests. This significantly reduces the time to load the form.

With Orbeon Forms 2025.1.1, we have made some improvements to the cache mechanism. With this, after the first load of a form, subsequent loading times for very large forms (with thousands of fields) can be significantly reduced compared to previous versions. An additional effect of this enhancement is reduced server memory use during that process.

Here are some numbers for a very large form as well as a small form:

This enhancement adds to the Page load and service performance improvements we introduced in Orbeon Forms 2024.1.

We hope you will like this feature of Orbeon Forms 2025.1.1!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

• Explanatory Text: This form control presents an explanatory text to the user.
• Button: This form control is used to trigger actions.

Until now, Orbeon Forms didn’t give you an option to omit the associated XML elements when saving form data, which means that these form controls had an associated XML element in the database, even if it didn’t make much sense.

But with Orbeon Forms 2025.1.1, you can now mark any form control as non-persisted, which means that their associated data, if any, will not be saved or submitted. This is done easily in Form Builder, in the Control Settings dialog, by deselecting the “Persist control value” checkbox.

Newly-created Explanatory Text and Button controls now default to be non-persisted, as it generally makes sense. You can change this default behavior in the Control Settings dialog if you wish so.

For other form controls, you need to explicitly mark them as non-persisted if you want to avoid saving their associated data. Common use cases include:

• Calculated Value: This form control presents a readonly value typically calculated from other form controls.
• Hidden: This form control is not visible to the user, but can be used to store data that is not meant to be edited by the user.

In both cases, whether the associated values are persisted or not depends on the use case. For example:

• Easily Recalculated Value: A form controls which stores the sum of two other values can easily be recalculated when the form is loaded.
• Transient Value for PDF Output: A transient calculated value can be useful to extract or combine other form control values to insert them into a PDF template.
• Time-dependent Calculation: Some calculations are performed only once, or depend on the specific moment of their evaluation and need to remain constant after that. In such cases, the value must be persisted.
• Data-at-rest Visibility: It can also just be useful to have access to such values directly in the data at rest.

When a form control is marked as non-persisted, it cannot be encrypted or indexed, as these features depend on the data being persisted. The Form Builder user interface reflects this by making sure the options are consistent.

We hope you will like this feature of Orbeon Forms 2025.1.1!

We had two requirements for this feature:

1. We wanted it to be easy to set up, without deep technical knowledge. In particular, we wanted to avoid requiring creating a custom page with HTML.
2. But we also wanted it to have some flexibility, for example to be able to show a custom message, with values from the form.

You configure the Orbeon Forms Confirmation page directly through a user interface in Form Builder. Here, you specify what message to show and whether a PDF download is also available. You can use templates to include values from the form, for example to show a personalized message with the name of the person who submitted the form. The message can, as usual in Form Builder, be localized by language.

You configure access to the confirmation page through a process button. For example, you can have a “Submit” button which submits the form and then shows the confirmation page. Here is an example of a confirmation page which shows after form submission:

Not all forms need to have a confirmation page, and forms which have one can have different ones. As usual with Orbeon Forms, you can choose to enable this feature on a per-form basis.

For details, see the documentation on the Form Runner confirmation page.

We hope you will like this feature of Orbeon Forms 2025.1!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

• New mode: For creating new form data.
• Edit mode: For editing existing form data.
• View mode: For viewing form data in a read-only HTML format.
• PDF mode: For viewing form data as a PDF document.

With Orbeon Forms 2025.1, we are introducing custom modes. This enables two new different features for integrators:

• Custom Views: Showing existing form data in custom ways, for example showing a subset of the form data for confirmation.
• External Navigation: Navigating away from and back to Orbeon Forms, for example for calling external services such as payment and signature providers.

The good news is that Orbeon Forms handles for you the difficult parts: data management, state keeping, and permissions, in particular, while you can concentrate on your custom mode logic. The following diagram summarizes the overall flow:

For details, see the documentation on Form Runner custom modes.

We hope you will like this feature of Orbeon Forms 2025.1!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page, or use our Docker images.

We hope you enjoy this release!

Discoverability

• We’ve updated the Keyboard Shortcuts page to display all shortcuts in one place, along with the version in which each shortcut was introduced.
• In dialogs, hovering your mouse over a tab that can be accessed with a keyboard shortcut now shows hints with the relevant shortcuts as an alternative to clicking the tab (available since 2024.1.1).

• Form Builder now includes a dedicated Keyboard Shortcuts dialog that lists all available shortcuts, allowing you to discover them without leaving the app (available since 2025.1).

  

Tabs and dialogs

• You can use keyboard shortcuts to switch between tabs in dialogs. Outside of dialogs, the same shortcuts let you switch between the Controls and Advanced tabs in the left sidebar (available since 2024.1.2).
• In the Control Settings dialog, you can now use shortcuts to navigate to the previous or next control, instead of clicking the Previous/Next buttons or closing and reopening the dialog (available since 2024.1.3).

Cells and editing

• Navigating between cells with the left and right arrow keys has been supported since 2020.1, and Form Builder now also allows navigation with the up and down arrow keys (available since 2024.1.1).
• We’ve added the ability to move the current grid line up or down (available since 2024.1.3).

A little-known feature of web browsers is their ability to duplicate a tab. Say you have navigated through a few pages, but would like to branch off: this allows you to copy the tab, and navigate to different pages in each tab. Each tab has a copy of the navigation history so far.

However, this feature can cause issues with web applications, which keep much more complex state compared with simple web pages. In the case of Orbeon Forms, it usually does not make sense to be able to duplicate the state of a form. For example, if you are following a simple workflow to fill out form data, branching off in the middle of the workflow and saving two different versions of the completed form is very likely to be incompatible with the business logic.

Introducing a warning message

Until now, Orbeon Forms would let you duplicate the tab, but you would get an error after using the copied tab. With Orbeon Forms 2024.1.3, we have added duplicate tab detection, which will warn you if you try to duplicate a tab.

While it is not possible to prevent the browser from trying to duplicate the tab, but we can detect the situation once the new tab is open, and tell the user that the new tab will not be usable. In fact, we make sure that the new tab is only able to show the user a message, and we disable the form’s functionality.

We hope you will like this new feature of Orbeon Forms 2024.1.3!

Often, however, data loss results from human behavior rather than technical failure. A common case is overwriting data by mistake. For example, a user might open the same form in two browser tabs and unknowingly save in one tab, overwriting changes made in the other. A similar situation can occur when two users unknowingly edit the same data. To address this, we’ve added automatic conflict detection: Orbeon Forms warns you before you overwrite data that has changed since you last loaded it.

This complements other safeguards that help prevent data loss, such as background autosave, granting users a lease on specific form data to prevent concurrent edits, and warnings when closing a tab or navigating away from a form with unsaved changes. This feature will ship with Orbeon Forms 2025.1, which we plan to release at the end of this year.

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

Following up on the new SSN and EIN form controls discussed in our previous post, we are now introducing two additional form controls for ISIN (International Securities Identification Number) and LEI (Legal Entity Identifier) in Orbeon Forms 2024.1.2. These will be very useful for government forms and enterprise forms, and in the financial sector.

International Securities Identification Number

Here is how the ISIN form control looks like in a form:

This form control automatically validates the ISIN format, including its length and its check digit.

Legal Entity Identifier

Here is how the LEI form control looks like in a form:

This form control automatically validates the LEI format, including its length and its checksum digits.

Orbeon Forms component system

Like for the SSN and EIN form controls, these ISIN and LEI form controls are implemented using the Orbeon Forms component system, which allows for the creation of reusable form controls, including builtin validations.

See also

For more information, see the documentation:

• International Securities Identification Number (ISIN)
• Legal Entity Identifier (LEI)
• US Social Security Number (SSN)
• US Employer Identification Number (EIN)

We hope you will like this new feature of Orbeon Forms 2024.1.2!

For government forms and enterprise forms in particular, having form controls for US Social Security Numbers (SSN) and US Employer Identification Numbers (EIN) is often a requirement.

While you could create your own field with custom validation before, with Orbeon Forms 2024.1.2, we are introducing built-in new form controls specifically for these use cases. They will just show up in the Form Builder toolbox, and you can drag and drop them into your forms.

US Social Security Number (SSN) Form Control

With the SSN form control, in particular, we made it easy to obscure the value, which is a common requirement for sensitive information. The SSN control also allows you to reveal the value when needed, using a checkbox when editing form data:

Or by showing only the last four digits in readonly modes such as the View and PDF modes:

The exact behavior of the SSN form control can be configured in Form Builder or using configuration properties, and it is possible to set the following options:

Security and GDPR

Because the SSN is a sensitive piece of information, we recommend that you handle this data in the following ways:

• Consider not requesting this information from users unless absolutely necessary.
• If you request it, consider making only transient use of it, such as calling a verification service, without storing it in your database.
• If you do store it, consider encrypting it in your database, and ensure that you comply with data protection regulations such as GDPR. Orbeon Forms supports encryption at rest, which satisfies this requirement.

US Employer Identification Number (EIN) Form Control

The US Employer Identification Number (EIN) form control is also available, which allows you to enter an EIN in the format 12-3456789. The EIN control does not have options for obscuring or revealing the value, as it is considered less sensitive than a Social Security Number.

Orbeon Forms component system

These components are implemented using the Orbeon Forms component system, which is a powerful way to create reusable form controls. We made some improvements to the component system to make it easier to create and use such components, so more components like those can be created in the future.

We have also prepared a brand-new form template which showcases these form controls, and we have updated existing templates which used SSN and/or EIN fields.

See also

For more information, see the documentation:

• US Social Security Number (SSN)
• US Employer Identification Number (EIN)
• Field-level encryption

We hope you will like this new feature of Orbeon Forms 2024.1.2!

With Orbeon Forms 2024.1.2, the “Control Settings” dialog is enhanced to let you set a custom PDF field name for each form field. This makes it easier to manage the mapping between form fields and PDF fields. If at least one PDF template already attached to the form, Form Builder will let you know if the field is not present in the PDF templates.

In addition, if there is at least one PDF template already attached to the form, you can directly pick a field name from the list instead of having to type it in.

See also:

• PDF templates documentation
• our recent post on PDF production

We hope you will like this new feature of Orbeon Forms 2024.1.2!

We are regularly profiling and optimizing Orbeon Forms. With Orbeon Forms 2024.1, in particular, we:

• improved page loading times by removing overhead in our internal page router (#6547)
• added database indexes to speed up form publishing and other operations (#5689)
• added paging support for the form metadata API, which improves the performance of the Forms and Admin pages (#5493)

With Orbeon Forms 2024.1.1, we continued with the following:

• improved performance of data reindexing (#6731/#6773)
• improved compilation times for formulas that refer to many form controls (#5948)

And now, for the upcoming 2024.1.2 release, we have already made the following improvements:

• improved the response of form updates when the user interacts with large forms by around 25% (#6981/#6995/#6998/#6999)
• made the Form Builder “Control Settings” dialog faster (#6972)

We hope that you will like these Orbeon Forms enhancements!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

We have been regularly adding keyboard shortcuts to Form Builder. Keyboard shortcuts are very useful for power users, as they allow you to keep your hands on the keyboard to create, edit, and navigate a form under construction. For all the details, see Keyboard shortcuts.

Up/Down navigation in Form Builder grids

With Orbeon Forms 2024.1.1, we just added support for the Up and Down cursor keys to move up and down in the form, including going across grid and section boundaries. The following video show this in action, as well as the Left and Right keys to move left and right in a grid:

This is very easy to use: select a cell, and then use the keyboard’s cursor keys to navigate between grid cells!¹ The selected cell moves to the next location, and, if needed, the form area scrolls.

We hope that you will like this new feature of Orbeon Forms!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

Orbeon Forms supports the notion of a workflow stage, which allows you to track the progress of a form through a multistep workflow. Workflow stages might be “submitted”, “approved”, “rejected”, and so on.

Orbeon Forms 2024.1 introduces some new features related to the workflow stage.

Searching by workflow stage in the Summary page

The Summary page always offered the option to show the workflow stage associated with form data. Since Orbeon Forms 2024.1 you can also search by workflow stage. This is useful to quickly find all the forms in a given workflow stage.

Workflow stage in the Navbar

Since Orbeon Forms 2024.1.1, you can enable showing the workflow stage in the navigation bar. This gives users of a form a quick way to see the current workflow stage of the form they are working on. Since this is only useful for some scenarios of workflow stages, this is disabled by default, but you can enable the feature for specific forms, apps, or globally.

We hope that you like these new workflow features in Orbeon Forms! For more details, see also:

• Workflow stage documentation
• New workflow capabilities in Orbeon Forms 2020.1

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

Automatic PDF

The automatic PDF generation is built-in: you don’t have to do anything to activate it. In general, the end-user can download the PDF with a button on the form’s Summary page or Detail page. These buttons are present by default, but you can configure them away if you wish.

Automatic PDF files contain a PDF table of contents based on the hierarchy of sections present in your form.

Automatic PDF files also support a comprehensive configuration of the header and footer. By default, this is what’s included:

• In the header: Orbeon logo and form title.
• In the footer: Form title, page number, and page count.

You can configure each of the fix header and footer locations (header/footer, left/center/right) separately, including:

• that it should remain blank
• that it should use the default
• that it should be customized

In addition, this can be done for all, first, odd, and even pages separately! The various parts can be shown or hidden with formulas, contain values coming from the form, and more. All, in all, the header and footer configuration is quite flexible. The following screenshot shows, for example, the automatic inclusion of a submission date in the PDF footer.

For more on headers and footers, see Automatic PDF header and footer configuration.

PDF templates

PDF templates use a completely different approach compared with automatic PDF generation. The idea is that you already have a PDF, and that Orbeon Forms will fill out markers in the PDF (expressed with PDF form fields) with data from the form. In order to do so, your form must make sure that field names match the names of the PDF form fields.

You can configure one or more PDF templates in Form Builder. When multiple templates are present, Orbeon Forms chooses one based on name and language.

For more, see PDF Templates.

More PDF uses

In addition to just let the user download a PDF, you can also send a PDF as an attachment to an email, or send it to a service endpoint. The following screenshot shows how you can configure a PDF attachment to an email in the “Email Settings” dialog.

Testing PDF output

You can test automatic PDF generation, including PDF templates, directly from Form Builder. We covered this feature in a previous post, “Testing PDF production in Form Builder”.

We hope that you like the PDF features in Orbeon Forms! For more, see the documentation.

• the ability to create form templates in Form Builder;
• the ability to create a new form in Form Builder from one of the available templates.

The “New Form” dialog now starts by presenting a grid of form templates that you can choose from.

A form template is simply a useful starting point for a new form. The following can be a common scenario:

1. Select a template, for example the “Feedback” or “Invoice” form template.
2. Update the form’s title, add and remove fields, in short, make it your own.
3. Test and publish your new form!

Two of the form templates are predefined (“Blank Form” and “Wizard Form”), and the others are, out of the box, example templates.

You can mark any form that you create as a template, and that form will then show in the list of available templates. Templates are searched within in-progress Form Builder forms, as opposed to published forms. This means that you can create a form, mark it as a template, save it (without publishing) and then use it as a template for other forms right away. End users of forms will not see these templates - only Form Builder users.

When a Form Builder user is restricted to creating forms in a particular Orbeon Forms application, only the templates that the user has access to will be shown in the New Form dialog. For example, if you can create forms in the acme application, only the acme templates will show.

You can associate a thumbnail with each form, which will be used in the Form Builder New page as well as on the Landing page. That thumbnail can be a screenshot of the form, or any other visual you choose.

Finally, note that form templates are different form section templates, which are a way to create reusable form sections. For more on section templates, see the documentation.

We hope that you will like this new feature of Orbeon Forms 2024.1!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

• for initial and calculated values
• for showing and hiding form controls
• for validating form controls
• and more!

Like in a spreadsheet, a formula often references other form control values. With Orbeon Forms, this is done with a “variable” notation using the symbol $. For example, if you have a field named price, you can reference its value in a formula with $price.

One issue is that it is not easy to remember all the field names. Form Builder shows an error if you reference a field that doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t help you with the field names themselves.

With Orbeon Forms 2024.1, we are improving this by adding completion of variable names everywhere a formula can appear. Simply type the $ character, and a completion menu appears. It shows not only the name of the field, but also its label.

As you type, the search narrows.

Finally, the value is inserted in the formula.

For more, see the Formulas documentation.

We hope that you will like this new feature of Orbeon Forms 2024.1!

However, there are cases where you’d like form controls to be less dense, for example when you have a form with a small number of controls, or when you want to make the form more readable.

Until now, this was only possible using custom CSS. But with Orbeon Forms 2024.1, Orbeon Forms introduces a new setting: “Form Density”. This setting is available in Form Builder, in the “Form Settings” dialog, under the “Appearance” tab:

There are three form density options, in order of increasing spacing between controls:

• Compact: This is the current default with Orbeon Forms until 2023.1.
• Comfortable: This is the default for forms created with Orbeon Forms 2024.1 and later.
• Roomy: Choose this for even more spacing between controls.

Here is how the same form layout looks with the three different form density settings. First, the default “Compact” setting:

Second, the “Comfortable” setting. Notice how the controls are spaced out more:

Finally, the “Roomy” setting:

In addition, you can use configuration properties to change the default globally, per app, or for a specific form.

For more, see:

• Form Builder documentation
• Configuration properties

We hope you will enjoy this feature of Orbeon Forms 2024.1!

File attachments in Orbeon Forms

As a quick review, Orbeon Forms supports the following file attachment form controls, available in the Form Builder toolbox:

For example, here is how file attachments look at runtime:

Video attachments

With Orbeon Forms 2023.1, we introduced a new type of attachment: video attachments. Like for images, there are two separate form controls:

As the name implies, this new attachment type allows you to attach videos to your forms. In addition, you can play them directly in the web browser.³

Storage options

Orbeon Forms now supports storing attachments on disk, instead of the relational database.

If you handle large and/or a large number of attachments, this can improve performance and reduce the size of the database. This is a simple configuration setting away (see the documentation).

Use of attachments

Attachments can be used in many ways. They can be:

• stored in the database or on disk for further editing and viewing in forms (default);
• attached to emails sent by the form;
• sent to service endpoints;
• included in PDFs generated by the form (images).

See also

• Video component
• Video Attachment component
• Attachment component
• Attachment controls

We hope you will enjoy this feature of Orbeon Forms 2023.1!

In the past, it was hard to figure out such errors. But Form Builder, since version 2023.1, features a Formulas console which is available when you test a form using the “Test Form” function.

The console lists every individual error with details about each. If an error occurs while testing the form, you can quickly go back to Form Builder by closing the Form Preview dialog and modifying the problematic formula.

See also the documentation.

We hope you will enjoy this feature of Orbeon Forms 2023.1!

The good news is that earlier this year, we have started to provide Docker images for Orbeon Forms for the 2023.1 maintenance releases. This means that you can now run Orbeon Forms without having to install Java or Tomcat! You just need to have Docker installed, and you can download and run Orbeon Forms with a single command.

While using Docker works great for just testing or evaluating Orbeon Forms, it can also be used for running Orbeon Forms in production, especially if you are already using Docker for other parts of your infrastructure.

For steps, see:

• The Try page for a quick start.
• The detailed instructions, including steps to compose Orbeon Forms with the PostgreSQL database.

We are working on making it even easier to do so in the future.

We hope you’ll like this new feature of Orbeon Forms!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

Orbeon Forms comes with a few powerful options to perform complex operations on or with forms. These fall into two main categories:

• Actions: They run within a form while the user is working with the form.
• Simple Processes: They typically run in association with a form button, such as a “Submit” button.

Actions themselves fall into two main categories:

• Simple Actions: You define these using a user interface in Form Builder.
• Action Syntax: You can do everything simple actions can do and more, but use a special syntax.¹

Simple Actions

Simple Actions are defined using a user interface in Form Builder. They are easy to use and cover many common use cases. They support:

• reacting to form load, activation, or value changes
• running the action or not depending on a condition
• calling a service and passing values to it
• setting values and choices in form controls as a result of the service call
• writing to a dataset

The Action Syntax

With the Action Syntax, you write sequences of actions, conditions, iterations, and more using an XML-based syntax.² They support:

• calling an action in response to multiple events
• conditionally running parts of an action
• repeatedly running parts of an action while iterating on data
• calling an arbitrary number of services, or none at all
• calling asynchronous services
• adding, removing, or clearing repetitions in a repeated grid or section
• setting or clearing form control values, including attachment control
• setting focus on or visit form controls
• copying form control content
• writing and clearing datasets
• calling processes

As you can see, the list is longer than the list of features supported by simple actions!

We recently wrote a full working example of the action syntax, which you can find here. This example, “List of Nobel Prize winners”, shows how to:

• call a service with a list of Nobel Prize winners in JSON
• iterate over the list of results
• set values in a repeated grid

Here is a preview of the action documented in the example:

<fr:listener version="2018.2" events="form-load-after-controls" actions="my-action"/>

<fr:action name="my-action" version="2018.2">
    <fr:service-call service="get-nobel-prizes"/>
    <fr:repeat-clear repeat="prizes"/>
    <fr:data-iterate ref="/*/nobelPrizes/_">
        <fr:repeat-add-iteration repeat="prizes" at="end"/>
        <fr:control-setvalue value="awardYear" control="year" at="end"/>
        <fr:control-setvalue value="category/en" control="category" at="end"/>
        <fr:repeat-clear repeat="laureates"/>
        <fr:data-iterate ref="laureates/_">
            <fr:repeat-add-iteration repeat="laureates"/>
            <fr:control-setvalue value="knownName" control="known-name" at="end"/>
            <fr:control-setvalue value="motivation/en" control="motivation" at="end"/>
        </fr:data-iterate>
    </fr:data-iterate>
</fr:action>

Simple Processes

Simple processes were introduced to control what happens when a user activates a button at the bottom of the page. For example, a “Submit” button can do a number of things: validate the data, make sure errors are shown to the user, and then submit the data to a service or the database. Processes make all of this very configurable.

You configure simple processes in configuration properties. The expectation is that those are more likely to be shared amongst many or all forms.

Parts of a simple process are called process actions, and they included operations such as save(), send(), email(), validate(), and more. Simple processes also support conditions and recovery actions.

Here is an example of a simple process:

<property as="xs:string" name="oxf.fr.detail.process.send.acme.hr">
    require-valid
    then email
    then send("https://example.org/")
    then navigate("/success")
    recover navigate("/failure")
</property>

More

We hope that this overview clarifies the types of actions you have in Orbeon Forms!³ For more, see the documentation:

• Simple Actions
• Action Syntax
• Action Syntax Examples
• Simple processes

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

• The latest entry is called current data or current revision.
• Earlier entries are called historical data or historical revisions.

Together, all those entries make up the revision history of the form data associated with a given document id.

Before Orbeon Forms 2023.1, only the current revision was accessible from the Orbeon Forms user interface, and accessing historical revisions required direct database access. But since Orbeon Forms 2023.1, a user interface is available to access the revision history of form data.

The user interface is disabled by default. When enabled, it adds a “Revision History” icon to the navigation bar. Activating that icon opens a Revision History pane showing the list of revisions of the form data, each including:

• a list of changes
• a link to access a readonly view of that revision history entry

For more, see the Revision History documentation. A Revision History API to access the revision history programmatically is also available.

We hope that you will like this Orbeon Forms 2023.1 feature!

The idea is simple: what you see in the Form Runner Summary page, including with sorting and filtering, and all the pages accessible using paging, can be exported to an Excel file with a couple of clicks.

Here is an example of Summary page. Notice the “Excel Export” button:

When you activate that button, you are presented with a dialog where you can choose from a few options:

The result is an Excel file with the data you see in the Summary page, as shown here.

We hope you will find this feature useful! For more, See also the documentation.

You might not know it, but Form Builder has had the following keyboard shortcuts for a while:

With Orbeon Forms 2023.3, we have added (or officialized in a couple of instances) a few more shortcuts. The shortcuts with multiple keys are entered in sequence.

Opening settings dialogs:

And also:

Inserting form structure:

Opening test dialogs:

And also:

We have also added shortcut hints on the relevant buttons. They show upon mouse hover on the buttons bar at the bottom of Form Builder, as well as on the Form Builder toolbox.

In the future, we plan to add even more shortcuts, and to apply more shortcuts to Form Builder dialogs as well. The goal is that, as a power user, you will be able to navigate and interact with Form Builder more efficiently.

See also the documentation.

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

We recently realized that we didn’t have a great way to stay in touch with our users, evaluators, or people who are just curious about Orbeon Forms.

We plan to send an update on average once a month, and keep the content down to the essentials aspects of Orbeon Forms:

• Security updates
• New features
• Tips and tricks
• New maintenance and major releases

To register, simply enter your email address below and press the Subscribe button!

We hope you will like this new way to stay in touch with us!

See also:

• Initial newsletter email
• Archives page

First, let’s review an existing feature: when focused in a form control cell in Form Builder, you can open its Control Settings with the Shift-Enter (⇧↵) keyboard shortcut. We have now added a tooltip to the Control Settings icon to make this feature more discoverable.

Second, while the Control Settings dialog shows lots of information, it did not tell you what kind of control you were editing. We have now added the control label, name, and type to the dialog title, so that you can see at a glance what you are editing, no matter what part of the dialog you are working on. Notice, at the top of the dialog:

• “Street Address” is the human-readable control label.
• “street-address” is the control name.
• “Text Field” is the control type.

Of course, the title updates as you make changes and as you navigate between controls using the “Previous” and “Next” buttons in the dialog.

We have done the same for the Section Settings dialog, which now shows the section label and section name in the dialog title.

We hope that you will like these Orbeon Forms 2023.1.3 improvements!

This has been true with Orbeon Forms even if your form is very simple and contains a single section. The drawback was you had to provide a possibly unnecessary section title, even if you didn’t want to display it. After all, in most cases the form title already provides enough information!

With Orbeon Forms 2023.1.3, we have implemented a simple heuristic to improve this: if a section title is blank, then we won’t show the section title at all when the form is deployed, instead of showing a blank section title placeholder as was the case before.

Notice, in the running form, that there is the form title at the top (“My Collection”), but no section title is shown.

We have also modified the default new form template in Form Builder: before, we had “Untitled Form” as default section title, which required you to remove that placeholder title and edit it. Now, the section title is blank by default, and you can just add one if you want to, or just omit it, in which case Orbeon Forms will omit the section title in the running form. It’s as simple as that!

This is a small change, but it makes the form authoring experience just a little bit smoother, and makes it easier to create simple forms.

We hope that you will like this Orbeon Forms 2023.1.3 feature!

Nothing prevents the user from filling out form controls in a different order, of course, but one place where this matters is the tab order, which is the order in which form controls are navigated when the user presses the Tab key (or Shift-Tab to go in reverse order).

With Orbeon Forms 2023.1, you have the option to change this default order, to obtain rows-first order.

You can set this in the Grid Settings dialog:

You can also set this in the Form Settings dialog to set a default value for all grids in the form:

Another place where this has an impact is the placement of grid cells on devices with a narrow display (for example smartphones) when all cells are stacked up following a responsive layout. The following drawings show the cells order, as well as the Tab key order followed:

Finally, you can also use configuration properties to set global defaults.

We hope that you will like this Orbeon Forms 2023.1 feature! For more details, see the documentation.

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!

There are multiple reasons why you might want to export form definitions and form data:

Orbeon Forms 2023.1 now allows you to export form definitions and form data comprehensively as a zip file, directly from the Forms Admin page.

What can be exported

You can export the following:

• Form definitions: published form definitions with their attachments.
• Form data: form data with their attachments.

Further, you can filter the form definitions and form data to export by:

• selected published form definitions in the Forms Admin page
• by application, form, and version filters

Or you can export forms by specifying a list of application, form, and version filters:

In addition, you can decide whether you want to export historical form data.

Indeed, Form Runner saves revisions of the data each time it is saved, with an associated timestamp. Your export can include or exclude this historical data.

For more information, see the documentation

Finally, you can filter the export by date range, allowing you to export only the data that was modified after and/or before the specified dates. This is useful if, for example, you’d like to export only the data that was modified in the last month, or all the data of the first quarter, and so on.

Running the export

You run the export from the Forms Admin page. The “Export” button on that page opens the Export dialog. Once you have selected all the options, the export starts, and the zip file will be downloaded to your computer when done.

See also

We hope that you will like this Orbeon Forms 2023.1 feature! For more details, including the zip file structure, see the documentation.

For details, see the release notes.

You can download the latest version of Orbeon Forms from the downloads page.

We hope you enjoy this release!