-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 220
FAQ ~ Orbeon Form Builder and Orbeon Form Runner
Orbeon Form Builder is a visual form designer which allows you to build and deploy forms in minutes right from your web browser.
Orbeon Form Runner is the Orbeon Forms runtime environment which usually runs forms created with Form Builder. Form Runner manages form definitions and form data, handles search, validation, and takes care of the plumbing necessary to capture, save, import and export form data.
- Orbeon Forms is the name for the whole forms solution developed by Orbeon.
- Form Runner and Form Builder are components part of the Orbeon Forms solution.
You can use Orbeon Forms without using the Form Runner or Form Builder components if all you are interested in is the XForms engine or the pipeline engine.
See the Orbeon Form Builder - User Guide (English) and Orbeon Form Builder - Guide Utilisateur (French).
Offline support is not a feature of Orbeon Forms as of December 2014.
See this issue for discussion.
Make sure your Java virtual machine (JVM) is configured with enough heap, as the default is sometimes too low.
This is the -Xmx option of Java. Set it to at least 500 MB of heap for local testing (e.g. -Xmx=500m), and more for production.
No, for multiple reasons:
- The Orbeon XForms engine relies on advanced features, including XPath 2.0, XBL, and extension functions not available in other XForms engines.
- Forms designed with Form Builder assume some standard components provided by Form Runner, like sections and grids.
This said, Form Builder forms are probably one XSLT transformation away from being runnable within some other XForms processors.
Form Builder produces XHTML+XForms files as output, but it follows a number of convention when creating forms. It is only able to read forms that follow those conventions, which means that in general, you can't just import your existing forms into Form Builder.
When you save or publish a form definition, it is stored through the Form Runner persistence API.
The API has a number of implementations. The default implementation is the embedded eXist XML database, but you can also use relational or your own implementation of the API.
There is no built-in integration with CMS or workflow engines. However you can integrate with systems in a few ways:
- Form Runner is built around a REST API for persistence, which allows you to integrate yourself with any system by providing an implementation of that API.
- Simple processes allow you to send data to external systems.
- If the form has not been published, simply open the form in Form Builder and make your changes.
- The same goes if the form has been published and no data has yet been entered.
- If the form has been published and data has been entered and your changes modify the structure of the data, you might have to manually migrate the existing data.
Remove, respectively:
WEB-INF/lib/orbeon-form-builder.jarWEB-INF/lib/orbeon-form-runner.jar
NOTE: Running Form Builder also requires orbeon-form-runner.jar.
Regular web technologies:
- AJAX mode: HTML, CSS and JavaScript
- Noscript mode: HTML and CSS
The short answer: In general, yes. But if you use the "noscript" mode (which has limitations), you can use clients which don't have JavaScript.
The long answer: Orbeon Forms is designed to work best with JavaScript enabled. This is where you get the most features of the platform. Functionality in noscript mode is limited, in particular there is no dynamic validation, certain events (focus events) are not available, and some widgets are not available (dialogs, etc.).
Form Builder requires JavaScript to work, but forms built with the builder which don't use features that require JavaScript will work in noscript mode.
- XML
Form Runner by default stores data in XML into eXist and relational databases. This does not require creating new tables, as we use generic tables.
Some relational persistence layers support a "flat view", which is created at form publication time. See Database Support.
No. A persistence layer implementation consists a few REST services that you implement. You simply tell Orbeon Forms, in a configuration file (properties-local.xml), what the URL of the service is.
You can implement them within Orbeon (for example using XML pipelines (XPL), or with any technology you like (Java, Ruby, PHP, you name it). In all cases, you won't need to modify Orbeon Forms beyond configuration properties.
Yes, you can save a form definition and get back to it later.
No. But you can use third-party tools to analyze the data.
Simply data validation that occurs as you type in a form and/or navigate between form fields.
This is as opposed to validation that occurs only when you press a "submit" or "save" button.
One benefit of as-you-type validation is that it allows the user to detect errors faster.
You can't just put the files produced by Form Builder or the HTML produced by the Form Runner runtime on a web site. The main reason is that forms produced by Form Builder need the server-side Form Runner runtime to function.
If you have installed the Form Runner runtime on a server, then you can run Form Runner alongside your other web pages or applications. Please note that Form Runner requires a Java servlet container.
Orbeon Forms 4.7 and newer supports server side embedding.
Not reliably, sorry.
- You can change fonts, colors, and other styling by creating your own CSS stylesheet, to supplement or override the default CSS.
- For changes that you can't do with CSS and that require modifications to the HTML sent by Orbeon Forms to browser, you can change the Form Runner XBL and XSLT stylesheets. But this is hard work and we discourage it.