Toolbox

Introduction

The Form Builder toolbox provides the following:

• Global icons:

  • Form Settings [SINCE Orbeon Forms 2017.2]

  • Cut/copy/paste

  • Undo/redo [SINCE Orbeon Forms 2017.2]

  • "Reload toolbox" [UNTIL Orbeon Forms 2017.1]

• Form structure:

  • New Section

  • New Grid

  • New Repeated Grid

• Form controls:

  • Form control (also known as form fields) you can add to your form.

• Metadata:

  • Allows you to modify the application name and form name.

• Advanced:

  • Includes advanced features like XML Schema, PDF and source code view.

• Services and Actions:

  • Editors for simple services and actions.

Depending on your monitor or browser size, you can use the scrollbar to the right of the toolbox to see more toolbox content.

Configuration of the toolbox

The toolbox can be configured via:

• Properties: for selecting and ordering the components that show in the toolbox.

• Component metadata: for the component names.

Cut, copy and paste

See Cut, copy and paste.

Undo and redo

See Undo and redo.

Reloading the toolbox

Function

The "Reload Toolbox" icon or button reloads all the components in the toolbox. After reloading:

• The list of controls in the toolbox updates to reflect changes to the oxf.fb.toolbox.group properties.

• The section templates libraries update.

• Section templates used in your form also update to their latest published version.

[SINCE Orbeon Forms 2019.1]

• The list of all available (published) versions of section templates is updated.

• The currently-selected versions of section templates, if still available, are updated to reflect their latest published.

For more, see Versioning of section templates.

Orbeon Forms 2017.2 and newer

The "Reload Toolbox" button is located at the top of the "Advanced" tab.

Orbeon Forms 2017.1 and earlier

The "Reload Toolbox" icon is located at the top of the toolbox:

Form structure

New Section button

Pressing this button inserts a new section into the form. The section is inserted after the currently selected section, that is the section containing the currently selected control.

After insertion, the new section has an empty title. You can change the section title by clicking on it.

New Grid button

Pressing this button inserts a new grid into the form. The grid is inserted after the currently selected grid within the currently selected section, that is the section and grid containing the currently selected control.

New Repeated Grid button

Pressing this button inserts a new repeated grid into the form. The grid is inserted after the currently selected grid within the currently selected section (the section and grid containing the currently selected control).

See also Repeated grids.

[SINCE Orbeon Forms 2019.1]

You can also switch a regular grid to be repeated. See Repeat settings.

Form controls

The toolbox contains the user interface controls you can insert into your form, grouped by category:

To add a control to your form, simply click on the control. The following insertion logic is implemented:

• If the currently selected grid cell is empty, the control is inserted there.

• Otherwise, if the cell to the right of the currently selected grid cell is empty, the control is inserted there.

• Otherwise, if the control is the last control of the grid, a new grid row is inserted and the control is inserted in the first cell of the new row.

• Otherwise, the controls in the toolbox are disabled and you cannot insert a new control.

Drag and drop of controls

Once a form control is inserted into the form, you can drag it to a different grid cell in the form: simply click on the arrow icon that shows when you hover over the grid cell, and drag it to the new location.

[SINCE Orbeon Forms 2022.1]

You can also drag a control directly from the toolbox to a grid cell in the form.

Text Controls

The controls appear like this at design time:

Utility Controls

Typed Controls

The controls appear like this at design time:

Date and time Controls

The controls appear like this at design time:

Selection Controls

You edit the choices of most selection controls with the Choices editor.

The controls appear like this at design time:

NOTE: The "Scrollable List" control is deprecated since Orbeon Forms 2016.1 and removed from the toolbox.

Attachment Controls

The controls appear like this at design time:

Here is an example of attachment control with multiple selection enabled:

/form-runner/component/images/xbl-attachment-multiple.png

This is the Handwritten Signature control (which of course you usually leave blank at design time):

Button Controls

Buttons do not allow entering data, and by default do nothing significant, but they can be used to trigger actions with the Actions Editor.

NOTE: Buttons do not appear at all in preview mode.

The controls appear like this at design time:

Choices

Choices (sometimes called options) refer to the items which are part of a selection control such as a dropdown menu or checkboxes.

For more, see the Itemset Editor.

Data dropdown

From the perspective of people who will be filling out your form, the data dropdown works just like a regular dropdown. However, the data in the dropdown comes from a service. For instance, imagine you have a list to select a state and that you don't want to hard code the list of states in the form, either for convenience, or because the subset of selectable states is dynamic:

1. Insert a data dropdown field.

2. Click on cogwheel to bring up a Control Settings dialog, similar to the one shown to the right.

3. In the Resource URI, enter the address of an HTTP service that returns the data you want to use to populate the dropdown. In most cases, the URL will look like http://your-host/your-service. If the address you specify start with a /, it is relative to the Orbeon Forms web app, which allows you to access a service you might have implemented in Orbeon Forms with XPL. For this example, let's assume your service returns a list of states that looks like:

<states>
    <state abbreviation="AK" name="Alaska"/>
    <state abbreviation="AL" name="Alabama"/>
    <state abbreviation="AR" name="Arkansas"/>
    ...
</states>

1. In the Items field, enter an XPath expression that returns one node per state. In this case, it will be: /states/state.

2. For each state (item), specify an expression relative to the node returning the label (shown to users in the dropdown) and the value (stored in the data). In this case, those expressions will be, respectively: @name and @abbreviation.

If the data in the dropdown depends on a value entered by users in another form field, you can pass that value to the service as a request parameter. For instance, let's say that in addition to the State dropdown, you have a City dropdown where you want to list all the cities in the currently selected state. If the service is at /xforms-sandbox/service/zip-cities and takes a request parameter state-abbreviation, assuming you named your State field state, in the Resource URI enter:

/xforms-sandbox/service/zip-cities?state-abbreviation={$state}

Limitation: you can't yet use a variable as shown in the above example, to refer to another fields value. Instead, if the control is in the same section use {../state}. If in a different section with name other-section, use {../../other-section/state}. See #431.

Autocomplete

The autocomplete control is a single item selection control that loads a list of suggestions from a service. It takes the same Resource URI, Items, Label, and Value configuration parameters as the [Data dropdown control][46]. You may want to pass the value of other controls to the service, but you'll always want to pass the currently typed value, as the suggestions should depend on what users typed so far. You access to the currently typed by value with $fr-search-value, as in the following example:

/xforms-controls/services/countries?country-name={`encode-for-uri($fr-search-value)}

Keyboard shortcuts

See Keyboard shortcuts.

See also

• Form editor

• Form area

• Buttons bar

• Section templates

• Documented XBL components

• XBL components

• Form Builder toolbox properties

• Component metadata: for the component names.

• Blog post: The new Multiple File Attachments control

• Blog post: Copying and pasting across forms