General

Now that Orbeon Forms 3.7 beta 1 is out, we have committed a series of changes that intend to improve the performance of the XForms engine. These particular changes initially focused on <xforms:insert> and <xforms:delete>, but they ended up requesting a fairly major refactoring of the XForms controls code on the server. Some (probably obscure) [...]

In the last few months, we have been regularly posting updates to Twitter so we have had less of a need to write full blog entries. But now we feel that owe the followers of this blog a higher-level update:

Form Builder and Form Runner. A big priority is our continued work on Form Builder and [...]

With XForms 1.0, xforms:output was limited to displaying plain text. With the introduction of XForms 1.1, xforms:output adds powerful capabilities which include handling images, HTML content and more, depending on your XForms implementation.

To achieve this, XForms 1.1 introduces a new mediatype attribute. You use it to specify the type of the content to display, using [...]

Wow, it’s been a month since our last post in this blog, and one of the reasons for this is that we have been very busy enhancing Orbeon Forms! Here is a quick list of the most notable additions:

XPath variables. XPath variables can be used within controls, models and actions, with the xxforms:variable (or exforms:variable) [...]

XForms 1.1’s small number of actions are surprisingly powerful. By combining them, you can do almost any operation you can think of within an XForms page. Yeah, XForms is Turing complete.

There are however a few use cases that remain difficult to achieve. For example, you can easily repeat an action while a condition is satisfied [...]

A couple of weeks ago I attempted to order prints from Flickr. I added a few photos to my cart and was redirected to a service called QOOP. This has a neat interface that allows you organize photos for printing in a book format. I played a bit with the interface and then was caught [...]

I recently booked a flight on the Continental web site. I knew approximately the flight I wanted to book, so dug right away into the search to select it. I encountered the following issues:

When the results came, the prices were in Swiss francs. Since I was in Switzerland but using a US credit card, I [...]

We had great success with the XForms Evening a the XML 2007 conference on Monday. We were wondering if people would really want to attend sessions that late in the evening (from 7:30 to 9:00 PM), but the attendance beat our expectations, with easily over 60 people cramped in the allocated room and some actually [...]

Yesterday, I was filling-out an application form on the E*TRADE web site.

So here I go, entering my information in a traditional wizard-like workflow, with page reloads et al. When I get to the end of it (about six or seven pages total), I figure I would check if I could amend my mailing address on [...]

When a form field is loosing the focus, the browser is supposed to send two events: blur and change. The latter is only sent if the you have changed the value of the field. When you change the value of a first field and tab to a second field, all the browsers get the events [...]

Over the last two weeks, we fixed a series of bugs that we considered blockers for Orbeon Forms 3.6:

Error when using browser back button when using xforms:instance[@src = ‘input:*’]

Label is not hidden when repeat iteration is added

Inspector does not show initial XML (in some cases)

Issue with adjacent itemsets

Google Suggests example doesn’t work anymore

XPL, XQuery, XSLT, [...]

A really cool thing about Orbeon Forms is that it automatically handles your browser’s back and forward buttons.

What are we talking about here? Browser back and forward buttons should just work, right? Well, not quite, at least not with web applications that dynamically modify the HTML page.

What happens when you navigate back and forth in [...]