General questionsWhat is Orbeon Form Builder?Orbeon Form Builder is a visual form designer which allows you to build and deploy forms in minutes right from your web browser. See the Orbeon Form Builder product page for more details. What is Orbeon Form Runner?Orbeon Form Runner is the Orbeon Forms runtime environment. Form Runner manages form types and form data, handles search, validation, and takes care of the plumbing necessary to capture, save, import and export form data. See the Orbeon Form Runner product page for more details. What is the difference between Orbeon Forms, Form Runner and Form Builder?
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. Where is the Form Builder documentation?See the Orbeon Form Builder - User Guide (English) and Orbeon Form Builder - Guide Utilisateur (French). How can I changes files in Form Runner? Form Runner is implemented in XForms, XBL, XSLT, and XPL, so you can make changes to the Form Runner files, and see the result of your changes by reloading the page in your browser. The Form Runner files are stored in the Orbeon resources, but since those files are rarely changed, they are packaged in
Instead of copying all the Form Runner files under in Questions about specific featuresWhen running Form Builder, I get an "out of memory" error. How can I fix it?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 300 MB of heap for testing (e.g. -Xmx=300m), and more for production.Can the forms designed with Form Builder run in other XForms engines?Out of the box the answer is no, for multiple reasons:
This said, Form Builder forms are probably one XSLT transformation away from being runnable within some other XForms processors.
Can I import my existing XForms documents into Form Builder?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. Where is my Form Builder form stored?When you save or publish a form, the form definition 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 Oracle, MySQL, or your own implementation of the API. See: Built-in persistence. Do you integrate with my favorite workflow engine / CMS?Out of the box, as of 2010-09, we have limited support for Alfresco. There is no built-in integration with other CMS or workflow engines. However, 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. We have plans to provide a better integration framework for workflow engines. Is it possible to edit and update a published form?Yes:
How can I deploy a version of Orbeon Forms without Form Builder / Form Runner?Remove, respectively:
NOTE: Running Form Builder also requires orbeon-form-runner.jar. What format/technology is used to enter form data?
Does JavaScript need to be enabled in the browser to use Orbeon Forms?The short answer is no, JavaScript is not required as the XForms engine and Form Runner support a mode called "Noscript", which allows for forms to work without 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, trees, etc.). NOTE: Whether you use Orbeon Forms with or without JavaScript, you still typically write your forms without JavaScript, using XForms. NOTE: 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. What format is used to archive data?As of June, 2010, the answer is yes and no: Form Runner by default stores data in XML into eXist, MySQL, Oracle, which does not require creating new tables, as we use generic tables. The Form Runner persistence layer is configurable and based on a REST API, however, so you can create your own persistence layer. If I write my own persistence layer, do I need to recompile Orbeon Forms?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 don't need to modify Orbeon Forms beyond configuration properties!
Can you start creating a form, save it, and get back to it later?Yes, you can save a form definition and get back to it later.
As of June, 2010, no. But you can use third-party tools to analyze the data.
What is "as-you-type validation"?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. Can I use Form Builder to create a form, and put the form on my web site?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. Can I use Form Builder to create a form, paste the form in a JSP, and use separate deployment?Since 2011-05-24, Orbeon Forms supports this type of form deployment in an experimental way. The separate deployment mode usually runs the output of your JSP directly through the XForms engine. But if the form contains an fr:view element, the form runs through the Form Runner renderer first.Form Builder-generated forms on the other hand expect pre-processing via the Form Runner runtime. This is needed to support all the Form Runner features, including built-in persistence, error summary, internationalization, etc. Currently the cleanest way to integrate such forms with your own app is to just run them side by side (Orbeon WAR + your own WAR) and navigate between each other via links and POSTs. Can I customize the appearance of forms I create with Form Builder?
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FAQ - 2. Orbeon Form Builder and Form Runner |