Orbeon Forms 2022.1.2 PE

We just published the Orbeon Forms 2022.1.2 PE maintenance 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!

Drag and drop from the toolbox

Since the beginning, Orbeon Forms used the idea of a toolbox to insert form sections, grids, and controls. The way you, as the form author, use the toolbox is simply by clicking one of the elements in the toolbox, which results in the insertion of the element into the form.

In addition, once a control is inserted, you can drag it around to move it to a different location in the form. You can even “shift-click” the drag icon to create a copy of the control (which, probably, few users know!).

However, there was no way to directly drag a control from the toolbox to the form! Orbeon Forms 2022.1 addresses this, and you can now drag a control from the toolbox to its intended location in the form.

Drag and drop from the toolbox

This is a pretty straightforward improvement, but hopefully it will help make Form Builder more intuitive to beginners and non-beginners alike.

For more, see also the Orbeon Forms 2022.1 release notes.

We hope you will like this enhancement!

Look and feel improvements

Introduction

Orbeon Forms 2022.1 improves the overall look and feel of Orbeon Forms! In particular, we made the following changes:

“Flat” buttons

Web design has tended to go back and forth between flat and 3D buttons. With Orbeon Forms 2022.1, we have decided to go back to flat buttons, following in particular the latest Bootstrap style.

Example of flat buttons

Form Builder and Form Runner dialogs

Similarly, we have given our dialogs a fresher look!

Example of dialog

Form Builder cell highlights

Form Builder now has a new look for cell highlights, which are bolder and without shadows.

Example of cell highlight

Navigation improvements

It is important for the user to have easy access to the operations available in Form Runner. To this end, we have made the navigation bar as well as the buttons at the bottom of the page “sticky”, so that they remain visible even if you scroll the page. This applies to all Form Runner pages, including the Summary page.

In addition, in previous releases, if you didn’t explicitly add a “Home” button to your forms, the user would not be able to easily reach the Form Runner landing page. In Orbeon Forms 2022.1, we added a “Landing Page” navigation icon at the top of the navigation bar. This can be disabled via configuration properties if you don’t need it.

Navigation improvements

Cleaner look for the wizard

The wizard now has a new lighter look.

Cleaner look for the wizard

Card-based look for the Landing page

The new Form Runner landing page is based on cards. You can choose which card shows on the landing page via configuration properties.

Card-based look for the Form Runner landing page

Consistent Summary, Form, and Admin pages

The Summary page and Forms/Admin pages (previously known as Home page) do similar things: they list form data or published form definitions, have paged navigation, and operations. With Orbeon Forms 2022.1, these pages look much more consistent. In particular, the Summary page is now “fluid” like the Forms/Admin page, and the operations and navigation are in the same place.

For more, see also the Orbeon Forms 2022.1 release notes.

We hope you will like these enhancements!

Orbeon Forms 2022.1.1 PE

We just published the Orbeon Forms 2022.1.1 PE maintenance 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 2021.1.7 PE

We just published the Orbeon Forms 2021.1.7 PE maintenance 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!

Time form control improvements

With Orbeon Forms 2022.1, we shipped a Time form control that had unintentionally lost its “smart input” capability. Luckily, we are fixing it with Orbeon Forms 2022.1.1. The good part is that this also gives us the opportunity to improve the Time control, as well as to write a little refresher about its capabilities!

Since the beginning, the Orbeon Forms Time control has supported “smart input”. Say you’d like to enter “1:00 pm”, well, just type “1p” and then press the Tab key. The control will automatically complete the input to “1:00 pm”, “1:00:00 pm”, or even “13:00:00” depending on the time format applicable to the control (you can also enter the full format if you wish so).

This is user-friendly, as it doesn’t require the user to enter the exact format. In addition, Orbeon Forms doesn’t try to guess beyond the obvious, so that you don’t have to worry about the control trying to be too smart and modifying your input too much.

With 2022.1.1, we are restoring and improving this function of the Time control. But we are also adding more. In particular, we have been unhappy with the way time formats were specified in Orbeon Forms. The format was specified globally in your configuration properties file, which is not flexible.

Instead, we have now made this a configuration of the Time control. This means that you can specify the time format for each Time control individually, at the form level, or in configuration properties, as is the case for all other form control configurations in Orbeon Forms. This also means that you can have different time formats within the same form.

Example of Time controls

We added a user interface to the Time control settings that looks like this:

Time control settings

The format allows you to control the following:

• use the 12-hour or the 24-hour format
• show or hide seconds
• show or hide am/pm and if shown, in what format
• pad the hours with zeros or not

This is done in the UI, so you don’t have to figure out a textual syntax (but you still use such a syntax in Orbeon Forms configuration properties).

Finally, we are also making a change to the time output in readonly modes (view and PDF, in particular). Previously, the output format in readonly modes was determined completely separately from the format used by the editable control. This was confusing. Now, the output format is the same as the format used by the editable control.

Example of Time controls in readonly modes

We hope you’ll like these improvements to the Time control!

For more, see the documentation on the Time component.

Improved selection of multiple items

Now that Orbeon Forms 2022.1 is released, let’s cover some of the new features of the release, starting in this post with a couple of simple but useful enhancements.

The Orbeon Form Runner Summary page and Forms/Admin pages (previously known as the Home page) list and link to form data or published form definitions, respectively. Each allows you to perform operations on one or more rows, such as deleting, publishing, etc. In both cases, you select one or more rows of data using checkboxes. When performing an operation on multiple rows, it is useful to be able to quickly select a series of rows. Until now, this required you to click each checkbox individually.

To help with this, we have implemented two new features:

1. Summary page: we added a new quick selection menu.
2. Across the board: you can “shift-click” checkboxes.

The Admin page already had a menu to select items in some categories. The Summary page now has a similar menu:

Selection menu

If you are familiar with for example Gmail, you might know that you can select a checkbox, and then shift-click another one, and all the checkboxes in the interval will be selected. Similarly, you can deselect a series of checkboxes. The exact logic is a little subtle, but we implemented something very similar in Form Runner.

Shift-clicking on checkboxes

The good news is that the ability to shift-click doesn’t only apply to the Form Runner Summary and Forms/Admin pages: it applies to any repeated checkboxes, as well as to the Checkboxes form control.

We hope you will find this Orbeon Forms 2022.1 feature useful!