Orbeon Forms 4.0 M5

Today we released Orbeon Forms 4.0 M5 (Milestone 5). Like 4.0 M4 and the previous milestones this is not a final release.

In this build we have implemented the following improvements:

• Invalid controls in Form Builder do not prevent saving and publishing the form (#341).
• Orbeon Forms outputs the HTML 5 doctype by default (#306).
• The language selection logic in Form Runner is rewritten and allows configuring which of the languages present in a form must be visible (#166, #117).
• We fixed an error in Form Builder when inserting a specific XBL control (#322).
• The $fr-roles variable works again (#328).
• fr:tabview events have been fixed (#329).
• We removed unwanted messages in the logs about missing instances (#174).
• The Page Flow Controller (PFC) has been partially rewritten to address the following:
• It now displays the configured error page in more relevant cases, including when accessing a non-existing Form Runner form (#150).
• Some elements and attributes now have more meaningful names, and the older names are deprecated.
• It supports an error handler in the PFC itself (instead of the web application level).
• It serves resources directly, so serving CSS, JavaScript and images should be faster.

We have also removed support for some old bits and pieces which were getting in the way:

• XForms: the "nospan" HTML mode.
• XPL: the uri and encapsulation attributes.
• PFC: custom matchers ("glob" and regular expressions are now built-in).
• Core: the Apache Jakarta ORO library (we use Java regular expressions everywhere).
• XUpdate support.

Work on the look and feel is still in progress but not yet committed. Stay tuned for this!

More information is available in the in-progress release notes for 4.0.

You can download the builds using these links:

• PE version: orbeon-4.0.0.m5.201207030329-PE.zip
• CE version: orbeon-4.0.0.m5.201207030346-CE.zip

Don't forget to grab a trial license for the PE version.

Please send feedback preferably to the ops-users list or via twitter (if short!), or feel free to comment on this blog entry if appropriate.