The state of Orbeon Forms, Part 6

Here is a summary of the Orbeon Forms developments for August/September 2009:

1. News

• XForms 1.1 went to W3C Proposed Recommendation. Further, XForms 1.1 is currently transitioning to full Recommendation. It took years to get there, but it was worth it: XForms 1.1 is a major improvement over XForms 1.0. We can now look forward to XForms 1.2 and XForms 2.0!

2. Form Builder and Form Runner

• Form Runner search. We improved search in the Form Runner summary page. By default we show a simple search field. You can then open a form-specific structured search.

• Form Builder metadata. Form Builder now shows a more user friendly and better looking dialog when you create a new form.

• Form Builder usability. You can now save a form right after you create it. All mandatory field have a default value.

3. XForms engine improvements

• Refresh events. We massively improved XForms refresh events (currently on the development branch). The wiki contains a description of these changes.

• Id resolution algorithm. Proper id resolution within repeats per XForms 1.1 is in!

• XBL id and XPath resolution. We have implemented (currently on the development branch) much improved handling of identifiers and XPath context within XBL components.

• XForms variables improvements and documentation. We added the nested xxforms:sequence element and improved the documentation on XForms variables.

• Date picker navigation. The date picker for input bound to nodes of types xs:date/xs:dateTime now provides previous/next year navigation.

• Improved controls HTML layout. We made good progress on improved HTML layout for XForms controls.

• Finer-grained logging. We made changes to allow for finer-grained XForms logging. See the documentation on the wiki.

4. Orbeon Forms tips

• Page Flow navigation example. See the updated xforms-wizard-pfc for an example of how to pass XML from one page to the next (no session, no mess).

• Event dispatch. How to dispatch events to all iterations of repeated controls.

• Lists depending on checkboxes. How to implement a list depending on checkbox items. See also the screenshot.

• Toggle with a dropdown. How to implement toggling between cases using a dropdown list.

• CSS inline blocks. We have a write-up on the Wiki on how to get CSS's inline-block to work as you would expect. (Not Orbeon Forms specific.)

5. Cool links from Balisage

• XForms and Genericode at NARA. See the blog post and the proceedings from Balisage.

• You Pull, I’ll Push: on the Polarity of Pipelines. If you are technical, this is a must-read paper about XML pipelines by Mike Kay.

That’s it for today. Enjoy!