Contents

1. 1 Introduction
2. 2 P1 features
3. 3 P2 features
4. 4 Later features
   1. 4.1 Form Builder
   2. 4.2 Form Runner
   3. 4.3 Orbeon Forms
5. 5 Thoughts about repeats
6. 6 Thoughts about handling concurrent writers

Introduction

• FB = Form Builder
• FR = Form Runner
• OF = Orbeon Forms

P1 features

• FB: Performance
  
• FB: Usability improvements (make it faster to enter form fields and associated information)

P2 features

• Features
  
• FB: Handle repeat (already supported in FR)
• FB: Handle sub-sections (already supported in FR)
• OF: Required fields must provide the option of showing an *.

Later features

Form Builder

• Usability
• Make first section title optional (should simply be top-level grid? create section when adding new section?)
  
• Prevent creation of duplicate app name/form name: warn user if form w/ same app/form name created
• Editors: would be nice to show control labels and/or control types for control selection
• When adding a field, not intuitive that the current text field is for the label. Add [Enter label] selected? Or background text that disappears when user starts typing text?
• In-place label edit for radio buttons and checkboxes
• "Navigation" from control to control within Detail, Help and Validation editors. Also support switching language when it makes sense.
• Automatic proposal of form name based on form title?
• Use YUI KeyListener to implement keyboard shortcuts (e.g. CXV, etc.).
  
• "Apply" should be automatic when you click somewhere else
• Form logo at top of form should not show upload control right away, instead use button to add
• Cut/copy should cause status message to display (make message handling more generic; how?)
• Help icon should appear all the time if help is not blank, not only on hover (or different icon, or ...)
• Better tabindex handling esp. for dialogs
• Handle tabindex in itemset editor?
• consider dialog and repeat
• assign id in the >= 100
• handler adds value for repeat iterations
• Link to online help
• Controls
• Include XBL bindings only for bindings in use at deployment/test time
  
• Text output control is not localizable
• should store its text in resources instance, instead of form instance
  
• Rich text input control, output HTML in FR
• Multi-line text output control
• UI to set incremental mode
• Easy switch between HTML area and regular textarea
• Easy switch between input, output, textarea, and secret
• Itemset editor
• validate that for multiple selection controls (e.g. checkboxes), the value must not contain spaces
• button to sort items
• allow insert an item other than at the end
• Move elements in instance when user moves controls in UI
• Detail/validation dialogs: like iTunes to navigate between fields, instead of having to close the dialog all the time to navigate to the next one
• Control labels: optional positioning on the left would be nice
• Date picker: format i18n
• Option for checkboxes and radio buttons appearance: vertical vs. horizontal -> set class
• Image buttons (ops-users question)
• Image widget must have read-only vs. read-write option (so users can upload their own images). Or, always display the upload field even in Form Runner for images
• Detail must enable editor for special control attributes
• built-in, like appearance, etc.
• custom attributes exposed by XBL components
• Button widget's label is empty by default so button appears very small
• Controls are not WYSIWYG
  
• Boolean input
  
• YUI Button
  
• Data model
• Specify external data model instead of letting FB dictate data model
• Upload/paste of XML file
• Allow binding controls to elements/attributes
• Is present, then disable FB modifications to data model
  
• Unable to handle a schema with targetNamespace
• Automatic initial generation of control ids/element names
• after label has been entered a first time
• poss: quick way of reviewing data model
• Validation: specify maximum length of field declaratively -> controls 1) validation constraint 2) HTML input length
• More common validation constraints. Ability to enter "facets" like XML Schema Part 2. Use @constraint, or create inline schema types?
• More XML Schema support
• Produce form template from schema
• Pick complex type and generate controls from that
• Allow specifying a schema which is global for the company (or for the particular Form Builder install). It could be selectable in the current UI
• If select control has a schema type containing an enumeration, should allow user to use that enumeration
• Other features
• Declarative description of services and actions
• currently this is code-generation
• instead produce instance describing fully the service, and runtime in FB executes service/action
• Form export/import of forms/form data
• Enable XPath 2.0 type annotations
• Section templates: actions / services within components
• Use fr:accordion for toolbox instead of custom accordion
• Deploy one or more forms from Summary page (can test, so why not deploy?)
• Noscript: produce fr:tr and fr:td?
• Doc: how to handle URLs to services for prod vs. validation environments
• Configuration for RTE: either RTE displayed inline, or HTML shown with edit button that opens the RTE in a dialog
  
• Handling concurrent writes/conflicts
  
• Base property to specify URL of services
• Roles to control e.g. who has the right to publish a form, etc.
• Ability to have select controls dependencies without using SOAP/JDBC.
• Better modularization of code. Needs xxforms:function for custom XPath functions
• Handle colspan
• Within a session, detect whether changes have modified the structure of the doc, + check whether there is form data for the given form, and warn on publish
• Publish must check whether form is already deployed, AND if so whether there is data for it in order to warn the user
• BUG: Safari 3.1 stops responding after a while (but "resurrect" if you click in the right place).
• Simple "style" editor to set form's colors, etc. a la blog
• BUG: Service Editor: test submission always have xxforms:username. If blank, the behavior will be slightly different from the actual submission without xxforms:username
• "Library sets": from UserVoice
• "I can see a need for a large collection of section templates for individual applications using form builder. Right now there is only one Library form, which could grow very large. I suggest supporting a set of Library forms available as a tree in the toolbar with selectable leaves for individual section templates."

Form Runner

• Summary page
• Use a shorter format for the date of creation and last modification, so they take less horizontal space
• Fix alignment of text between the paging icons
• Introduce a help dialog shown the first time the page is open that presents the main operations
  
• Variable-width summary page for large number of columns (issue: make the datatable scrollable shows the scrollbar even if there is enough horizontal space)
• Switch to using the paging provided by the datatable
  
• Summary page should support sorting (bug)
  
• Summary page must be able to list forms available. Maybe list applications, then for a given application list forms?
• Summary page to allow to search by range if the type of a column is numeric or is a date (or maybe allowing a range, like Gmail search does)
• Allow users to temporarily add columns based on the form fields, for fields that are not defined as appearing on the summary page by the form author.
• Allow users to export the data shown in the summary table in CSV or Excel format. When users click on the "export" button, a dialog will be shown with the following options:
• Export the summary data currently being viewed in CSV format
• Export all the data from the forms returned by the current search in XML format (when this option is chosen, a zip will be generated; it will be named app-form-date.zip, and contain one XML file for each form instance based on the current search)
• Summary page should not be case sensitive for eXist [check if still the case]
• Summary page must show Oracle errors
• Order of columns in summary page should be document order, not binds order
• Control which buttons you want on summary page => property
• Advanced search/xquery/export as XML
  
• Detail page
• "Wizard" appearance for sections
• Add page size selector (like new XForms Controls example)
• Add smart error / warning icons (need new native visited flag + use span layout)
  
• CSS: need mechanism of "theme" for alerts, labels, radio buttons layout based on ancestor class, e.g. fr-radio-vertical, fr-radio-horizontal; fr-label-top, fr-label-left; etc.
• Time: allow hours/minutes without seconds (HH:MM)
• XML view button
• Auto PDF output to produce header/footer/page numbers based on CSS 3 margin boxes and running elements
• Next/prev doc when viewing a form
• Submit (POST) to a particular URL during the send process. See [ #314761 ] FR: RFE: Ability to POST form data to a particular URL upon send
• Other
• Better / official integration with Liferay
  
• CMIS integration (would help support Alfresco, etc.)

Orbeon Forms

• Credit card component (using card type)
  
• Refactor instance inspector code to use variables, iterate, etc.