Orbeon Forms 2018.2.4 PE

Today we released Orbeon Forms 2018.2.4 PE!

This update to Orbeon Forms 2018.2.3 PE contains bug-fixes and is recommended for all Orbeon Forms 2018.2.x PE users.

For details, see the complete release notes.

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

We hope you enjoy this release!

New layout choices for PDF and browser views

Form Runner produces automatic PDF files in US letter portrait format by default. It is possible, with custom CSS, to change that default, but this is not extremely convenient.

With the upcoming Orbeon Forms 2019.2, you can set the PDF page size and orientation directly with the Form Builder Form Settings, or with configuration properties.

PDF Options showing a landscape A4 PDF output format

Page sizes can be US letter, A4, and US legal. The page orientation can be portrait or landscape. The latter is particularly useful for forms that require a wider layout - which takes us to another new, related feature.

So far, the Form Runner form layout has been fixed. That is, the form takes a fixed width even if you have a wider browser window. This is true whether you use the wizard view or not. With this new setting, you can opt for a fluid form width, where the form takes all the width available in the browser window. This works with or without the wizard view, as well as in the view mode.

View Options showing the choice of a fluid width

When choosing the fluid width, Form Builder also shows the form being edited with a fluid width, which makes it easier to edit forms that require a wider view.

We hope you will like these new Orbeon Forms features!

Orbeon Forms 2019.1

Today we released Orbeon Forms 2019.1 PE and Orbeon Forms 2019.1 CE!

This release is packed with new features and enhancements which should help form authors and form users be more productive, including non-repeated grid settings, renaming of control references in formulas, improved dropdowns, and much more. We closed over 180 issues since Orbeon Forms 2018.2.

For details, see the complete release notes.

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


We hope you enjoy this release!

Making authentication easier with a new built-in user menu, login and logout pages

In cases you need users accessing Orbeon Forms to be authenticated, if you decide to have that authentication done by your web container, the latter needs to be configured with:

• A login page, where users enter their username and password, which is then checked by the web container before it lets users through to Orbeon Forms.
• A logout page, which, as you might expect, logs users out by invalidating their web container session, and tells users they have been successfully logged out.

You can create your own login and logout pages, but since version 2018.2, you can also use the built-in login and logout pages provided by Orbeon Forms, making the authentication setup with Orbeon Forms simpler.

Also since version 2018.2, Orbeon Forms provides a user menu you can show in the navigation bar, allowing users to login, logout, and register. The user menu is configurable:

• You can decide whether you want the menu to show.
• You can decide what entries are shown by the menu. For instance, you might want to have Login and Logout, but not Register.
• For each menu entry, you can configure where users are taken when they select that entry. Out-of-the-box Login and Logout entries take users to the built-in pages discussed earlier, but you can configure the menu to take users to other pages should you already have your own login/logout pages.

For more on this, see Login & Logout.

Paging large repeated sections

Orbeon Forms 2018.2 introduced synchronized master-detail views. This is a powerful feature which helps form author and end-users alike deal with large forms. So far, however, all the repetitions of the details were presented on a single wizard page. If there is a lot of information to capture in each detail or a lot of items to repeat, the resulting page can still become very large.

Orbeon Forms 2019.1 introduces an improvement to this feature: it allows each individual detail to show on a separate wizard page. This makes it easier for the user as there is less information presented on each wizard page. In addition, you can configure a custom repetition label for use by the wizard's table of contents.

In the example below, you can see that the wizard's table of contents reflects the list of travelers. It does so automatically and updates as you add, remove, move, or update items in the master view.

Master View with Synchronized Table of Contents

You configure the repetition label direction in Form Builder, with a new "Repetition Label" section setting. The label can be dynamic and make use of fields within the given iteration. Here we include the traveler's name in the label.

Custom Repetition Label

As a user, you navigate to each detail separately. Here, you can start with Alice, but you can as well start with Bob since every detail is independent from the other.

Traveler Detail

When using strict validated navigation, all the details need to be filled before the user can navigate to the next section, here "Confirmation".

For more details, see the documentation:

• Paging large repeated sections (wizard)
• Paging large repeated sections (synchronization)
• Dynamic iteration label

We hope you will like this Orbeon Forms 2019.1 feature!

Back and forward navigation

Handling browser back and forward navigation has historically been difficult for web applications. [1] What should they do when the user activates the back and forward buttons?

With plain old static web pages, the answer is easy: just show the page which is back or forward in the browser’s navigation history, and that’s it. The browser will do the work for you, in fact, and retrieve the content from cache or again from the server.

But with pages that have some dynamic behavior, or even more so with full-fledged web applications, the answer is more complicated.

One philosophy which is consistent with what happens with static web pages consists in showing the app as it was when you left it. [2] Certainly, you don’t want to see a page or form which is completely out of date and missing the data you just captured, for example. And unfortunately, that latter behavior is still the default with most web browsers.

To be fair, web browsers have started making things easier to web applications when the circumstances are right, under the name “bfcache” (for “back/forward cache”). Firefox and Safari have had this feature for a while, and soon Chrome will have it too. This is great for users and works in many cases, but there are still situations where the browser won’t be able to restore the application (for example if the state has been removed from cache to save memory).

Until that kind of feature is available perfectly everywhere, your application has to do some work to behave as the user would expect it. Specifically, the web application must realize that the user just landed on it with back or forward navigation, and restore its content as needed. In the case of Orbeon Forms, this means making a call to the server to retrieve some state that allow the form to update itself. And Orbeon Forms has done this work since the very beginning, even before browsers had APIs to help with that. [3]

Now, with Orbeon Forms 2019.1, we have made improvements to the reliability of this feature by using the web browser's history API. Orbeon Forms stores some small state associated with the page, and upon back/forward, performs that call to the server to restore everything as it was before navigating away. This is made possible since Orbeon Forms’s UI software is based on computing differences to apply to the user interface when changes happen, such as changing field values, adding repetitions to a grid, and or hiding a section.

The bottom line is that with Orbeon Forms, you can expect that if you use the back and forward buttons, the data you just entered is not lost. And we have just made that more reliable.

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1. In fact, many modern web apps still don’t handle browser navigation in a reasonable way, and that’s if they care at all to address the question.  ↩

2. Possibly with some refresh of data for applications where it makes sense.  ↩

3. Orbeon Forms used hidden form fields for that purpose until version 2018.2.  ↩

Freezing rows in repeated grids or sections

Repeated grids and sections in Orbeon Forms are already quite flexible. With Orbeon Forms 2018.2, we added a new option to allow making a number of repetitions frozen.

Repeated grids and sections usually work as follows:

• At design time, the form author:
• creates a repeated grid or section and adds controls within it.
• specifies a minimum and/or a maximum number of allowed repetitions (there might be no minimum or maximum).
• specifies a number of initial repetitions.
• At runtime:
• Users can add, remove, or reorganize the repetitions.
• Optionally, the grids can be populated by services.

In some cases, some repetitions must not be allowed to be removed or reorganized. This is what this new feature is about: freezing the first N iterations of a repeated grid or section.

You enable this simply by selecting the "One repetition" or "Other" radio buttons in the "Repeated Content" tab of the "Section/Grid Settings" dialog.

Repeated Content Settings

The number of frozen iterations must be at most the minimal number of iterations. If that's not the case, the number of frozen iterations will be set to the minimal number of iterations.

At runtime, the user can still enter information in the frozen rows, unless form controls are specifically marked as readonly. But the repetitions cannot be moved or removed.

Repeated grid with two frozen repetitions

In the example above, the user cannot insert a new repetition between the first two repetitions. The menu for the first frozen repetition is not even shown.

For more, see the documentation. We hope you will enjoy this Orbeon Forms 2018.2 feature.