The setup for the relational persistence layers is a 3 step process. The first two steps are database specific, so please refer to the relevant subsections below.
1.
Database setup: You setup the database and create a schema with a few tables. This is typically be done by a DBA.
2.
Application server setup: You configure your application server to use the database.
3.
Orbeon Forms setup: You configure Orbeon Forms to use the relevant persistence layer.
Support for Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2 are Orbeon Forms PE features.
Database setup
Oracle database setup
1.
Make sure that Oracle's Database Character Set is set to AL32UTF8, also as recommended by Oracle. You can see you database parameters by running the following query: select * from nls_database_parameters, and the Database Character Set is identified by nls_characterset.
2.
Create a user/schema in Oracle, for instance with the commands below. In this example "all privileges" are granted to the newly created user/schema, which is not strictly required. You might want to fine-tune permissions on your system as appropriate. If you had already created this schema and that the definition changed, or that you want to restart from scratch for some other reason, you can first delete the schema with all the data it contains with drop user orbeon cascade.
1
> sqlplus sys/password as sysdba
2
SQL>CREATEUSER ORBEON IDENTIFIED BY password ;
3
SQL>GRANTALLPRIVILEGESTO orbeon ;
4
SQL>GRANT UNLIMITED TABLESPACETO orbeon ;
Copied!
3.
Run the following DDL to create or update your Orbeon database, and note that if upgrading to 2016.2, you need to reindex your Orbeon database.
With Oracle 11.2, XMLType values are stored by default using the binary XML storage. The binary XML storage has numerous benefits over the basic file storage. In many respect, it is the "proper" way to store XML. However, we found that Oracle fails to properly save some documents when the binary XML storage is used. In particular, when documents have attributes with long values (several thousands of characters), when retrieving the document, the value of some attributes is missing. For this reason, until this issue is solved by Oracle, we recommend you store XMLType values as "basic file", per the above DDL.
MySQL database setup
Supported MySQL versions
[SINCE Orbeon Forms 2018.2]
MySQL 5.7 and MySQL 8: Since version 2018.2, Orbeon Forms uses the utf8mb4 character set instead of the utf8 character set. The reason being that MySQL's utf8 character set can only store UTF-8-encoded symbols that consist of 1 to 3 bytes, that is characters in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane, which means that none of the characters in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, which include Emojis, could stored. However, the switch to the utf8mb4 character set will prevent you from creating some indexes on MySQL 5.6 where default key prefix limit is 767 bytes. Hence we recommend you use MySQL 5.7, which raised the index key prefix length limit to 3072 bytes for InnoDB tables. If in your situation upgrading to MySQL 5.7 isn't an option, you can explore enabling the innodb_large_prefix configuration option on your MySQL 5.6, or changing the DDL that ships with Orbeon Forms to use utf8 instead of utf8mb4.
[UP TO Orbeon Forms 2018.1]
Minimum version: The MySQL persistence layer relies on XML functions that have been introduced in MySQL 5.1, so you need to be using the MySQL 5.1 (which was released in November 2008) or newer.
Recommended versions: However, we recommend you use MySQL 5.6.4 or newer, as it supports storing fractional seconds.
MySQL 5.7: With MySQL 5.7, since Orbeon Forms 2016.2, you must set the sql_mode to ALLOW_INVALID_DATES, or you might get errors while creating the database schema.
Unicode support
By default, the MySQL JDBC driver uses the character encoding and character collation set on the server. Up to MySQL 5.7 (included), the default character encoding is latin1 and the default collation latin1_swedish_ci. Since MySQL 8, the default character encoding is utf8mb4 and the default collation utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci. So, if you're using MySQL 5.7 or earlier, you must specify the following 2 parameters when starting MySQL:
1
--character-set-server=utf8mb4
2
--collation-server=utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci
Copied!
Setting up users and schema
1.
Create a new user orbeon. Orbeon Forms will connect to MySQL as that user.
Orbeon Forms relies on SQL Server's full-text search, which is included out-of-the-box in all SQL Server editions, except the Express and Express with Tools. If you're using one of those two editions of SQL Server, you might want to look into getting Express with Advanced Services.
Run the following DDL to create or update your Orbeon database, and note that if upgrading to 2016.2, you need to reindex your Orbeon database.
${HOST}: the host Oracle server is running on, for example oracle.acme.com
${PORT}: the port the Oracle server is running on, for example 1521
${INSTANCE}: the instance name, for example orcl
${USERNAME}: the user/schema, for example orbeon
${PASSWORD}: the password, for example password
Tomcat
Put the Oracle jar file that contains the JDBC driver (e.g. ojdbc6_g.jar, xdb.jar, and xmlparserv2.jar) in the appropriate directory for your application server (on Tomcat: common/lib or simply lib, depending on the version). If you don't already have it, you can download the Oracle JDBC driver from the Oracle site.
Your Resource element pointing to the your Oracle instance (see also Tomcat datasource configuration above). In the example below, the Oracle server is running on localhost, the instance name is globaldb, and the user/schema is orbeon with password orbeon. Those values are highlighted in the configuration below, and you'll most likely want to change them to fit your setup.
​Download the MySQL JDBC driver, called Connector/J, e.g. mysql-connector-java-5.1.39-bin.jar (latest version as of 2016-06-20)
2.
Copy it in the appropriate directory for your application server (on Tomcat: common/lib or simply lib, depending on the version).
3.
Setup a JDBC data source for your MySQL schema (see also Tomcat datasource configuration above). In the example below, the MySQL server is running on localhost port 3306, the schema is orbeon, the username/password is orbeon/orbeon. Those values are highlighted in the configuration below, and you'll most likely want to change them to fit your setup. Also, on the JDBC URL you're telling the MySQL driver to use Unicode and the UTF-8 encoding when talking to the database, which we highly recommend you to do in order to avoid encoding issues with non-ASCII characters.
Uncompress the zip file, and copy the sqljdbc4.jar it contains to the appropriate directory for your application server (on Tomcat: common/lib or simply lib with newer Tomcat version).
3.
When using Java 11 or newer, you might need to add the JAXB API, which was present in earlier versions of Java. Download the JAR file from Maven and place it in the same directory you placed the JDBC driver.
Uncompress the zip file, and copy the db2jcc4.jar it contains to the appropriate directory for your application server (on Tomcat: common/lib or simply lib, depending on the version).
What follows applies to Orbeon Forms 4.0 and newer. For Orbeon Forms 3.9, see this legacy documentation.
With a single schema
In your properties-local.xml, you map an app / form / form type to the implementation of the persistence API you're using with the oxf.fr.persistence.provider.*.*.*wildcard property. For instance, if using Oracle, set the property to:
1
<property
2
as="xs:string"
3
name="oxf.fr.persistence.provider.*.*.*"
4
value="oracle"/>
Copied!
With multiple schemas
The single schema configuration described in the previous section uses the predefined oracle and mysql providers. To use multiple schemas you need to define you own provider names. For instance, assume that you have two apps, hr and finance, and would like both the form definition and data for those apps to be stored in two separate schemas:
1.
In your application server configuration, you setup two data sources ; let's call them hr-datasource and finance-datasource.
2.
In properties-local.xml, you use the following properties to define two providers hr and finance that you configure to use the desired persistence layer implementation (Oracle in this example) and data source:
1
<!-- HR provider -->
2
<property
3
as="xs:anyURI"
4
name="oxf.fr.persistence.hr.uri"
5
value="/fr/service/oracle"/>
6
<property
7
as="xs:string"
8
name="oxf.fr.persistence.hr.datasource"
9
value="hr-datasource"/>
10
​
11
<!-- Finance provider -->
12
<property
13
as="xs:anyURI"
14
name="oxf.fr.persistence.finance.uri"
15
value="/fr/service/oracle"/>
16
<property
17
as="xs:string"
18
name="oxf.fr.persistence.finance.datasource"
19
value="fiance-datasource"/>
Copied!
3.
Still in properties-local.xml, you map the hr and finance app to the respective provider:
1
<property
2
as="xs:string"
3
name="oxf.fr.persistence.provider.hr.*.*"
4
value="hr"/>
5
<property
6
as="xs:string"
7
name="oxf.fr.persistence.provider.finance.*.*"
8
value="finance"/>
Copied!
Flat view or table
Orbeon Forms stores form data as XML in relational databases, which gives it a lot of flexibility. However, it might be harder for other tools to access this XML data. For this reason, you might want to provide other tools a way to access the XML data through another "flat" table or view that has one column per form field.
Orbeon Forms doesn't provide a way to have a table or view automatically created for a form upon publishing in MySQL. However, you can do this manually. For instance, assume you want to create a "flat" bookshelf table for the sample bookshelf form. You want that table to have 3 columns:
title corresponds to the title form field;
author corresponds to the author form field;
document_id corresponds to the column with the same name in orbeon_form_data.
Start by creating the bookshelf table:
1
createtable bookshelf (
2
document_id varchar(255),
3
title text,
4
author text
5
);
Copied!
Choose an appropriate type for your columns, depending on the maximum length for the fields. Then create a trigger, which will update your bookshelf table when form data is saved in orbeon_form_data:
1
delimiter|
2
createtrigger bookshelf_trigger before inserton orbeon_form_data for each rowbegin
3
if new.app ='orbeon'and new.form ='bookshelf'then
4
deletefrom bookshelf where document_id = new.document_id;
5
if new.deleted ='N'and new.draft ='N'then
6
insertinto bookshelf set document_id = new.document_id,
7
title = extractValue(new.xml,'/form/details/title'),
Since you are interested in data for Bookshelf form, which is in the app orbeon form bookshelf, the trigger only does something if new.app = 'orbeon' and new.form = 'bookshelf'. To enable auditing, the MySQL persistence layer never deletes or updates data; it only inserts new row. So your trigger only needs to be concerned about updates. On insert, you want to make sure you are not creating duplicates in your bookshelf table, hence the delete statement. When a newly inserted row has delete = 'N', this indicates that a user deleted that document, in which case you don't want to insert a row in your bookshelf table, hence the if test.