Improved Form Runner Home page usability

Orbeon Forms 4.6 improves the performance and usability of the Form Runner Home page.

The Form Runner Home page

As a reminder, the Form Runner home page has two purposes:

• For regular users, it is a start page which lists the forms available to the user and allows navigation to the Summary or New page.
• For administrators, it provides a range of administrative functions such as publish/unpublish, moving forms to a remote server, and more.

Recently, while using the Home Page with databases containing large numbers of published forms, we noticed performance issues, especially when loading form definition metadata from both a local and a remote server. So we fixed the following for Orbeon Forms 4.6:

• We made joining local and remote form metadata much faster.
• We addressed a few inefficiencies common to all databases.
• We made retrieval of form metadata much faster with the Oracle database (which should help with other relational databases as well).
• We added paged navigation to make the HTML page smaller and faster.

With these changes, the Home page shows good responsiveness even with hundreds or a few thousands of published form definitions!