CMS Forms release notes

The Form Builder Summary page is the one you first see when you log into the Form Builder. It’s where you’ll see a list of the forms you have access to.

• Cleaner “flat” design
• “Sticky” navigation and button bars
• New multiple selection control in the upper left
• Note that page navigation has been moved to the upper right

See the Orbeon blog posts:

• Look and feel improvements
• Improved selection of multiple items

When you click on a form link in the Form Builder Summary page, you are brought to the Form Builder Editor page so you can work on that form.

There are several “look and feel” improvements:

• Cleaner “flat” design
• Bolder highlight around selected control (or “cell”)
• Drag-and-drop is now supported
• Keyboard shortcuts are expanded
• Hovering over a control displays its name in an overlay
• Title bars for control settings windows now show:
  • The label
  • The control name
  • The control type
• You can easily reset the value of a “Yes/No Answer”. Previously you had to either edit the XML or recreate the control
• You are warned when referring to a non-existent variable in a formula
• You can quickly search for a control, even if it’s not visible, thus unavailable to the usual control-f option.
  • This was available in our previous version, but you might have forgotten about it

There are also many new controls, features, and options covered below.

See the Orbeon blog posts:

• Look and feel improvements
• Improved Keyboard Shortcuts
• Settings Dialogs Titles
• Drag and drop from the toolbox
• Quickly navigate to fields in large forms

There are now additional options you can select from when testing a PDF in the editor:

• Show control hints
• Show invalid control alerts
• Style required controls

See the Orbeon manual:

• Testing PDF production / Showing hints and alerts

You can now export your form definition in XHTML+XForms format, the form definition format used by Orbeon. It’s a faster and safer way to back up or share your form definitions than copying the content of the “Edit Source” dialog.

Simply click the “</> XHTML Export” button.

A new formulas console appears at the bottom of the Form Preview when you are testing a form. It can locate errors that occur during testing. You can use this in conjunction with the formulas inspector.

See the Orbeon manual:

• Formulas console
• Formulas inspector

Previously, you had to label a section to avoid a big blank space. Now, Orbeon will supress that line if the label is blank. You may find this useful for the first section of your form where the section label appears right after the page title, and the blank space looks a bit too big.

See the Orbeon blog post:

• Optional Section Labels

You may have had a long, conversational section label like, “What’s the best way to connect with you?” If you chose the Wizard (paged) view, that label would scroll off the navigation pane or wrap to multiple lines.

Now you can specify a short label that will be used instead, like “Contact information”.

You can still have that conversational style and not worry that the interface will be too cluttered.

See the Orbeon manual:

• Section settings / Label, help message, and short labels
• Wizard view

You can now set how a grid is treated when a form is narrowed for viewing through a mobile device. This allows you to set up a grid with a “vertical” orientation and keep elements in columns together as the canvas shrinks.

See the Orbeon blog post:

• Grid Tab Order

This new dropdown found on control basic settings allows you to specify if a field can access and use browser data to pre-fill a form.

For technical information and a description of values see:

• Mozilla Developer Network | HTML attribute: autocomplete

Number and currency fields can now be right-aligned instead of the default left.

See Orbeon blog post:

• Right-aligning number and currency fields

There’s a new “With Clipboard Copy” option on the following controls:

• Text Field
• Text Area
• Calculated Value

This allows citizens to copy content from their form for another use.

See the “Copy to clipboard” button description in Orbeon’s release notes.

You can now have a dropdown menu with an “Other” selection that captures user input, just like with radio buttons.

See it in the toolbar in the Selections Control group and try it out.

You can now embed a video in your form. Try this for things like orientation, information, and explanation. You could also use a video to present a scenario to someone as part of an exam.

Users can also upload videos that can be played within the form, but it appears that this may only work in a part of Orbeon we currently don’t make available. (There is very limited documentation at this point.)

Note that this is a new control and embedding in PDFs isn’t quite working correctly. You may want to wait until this feature is a bit more mature before using it.

See the Orbeon manual:

• Video

Previously, Orbeon could only generate and send one email notification. It was common for these emails to send everything (including PDF and XML files) to the citizen with a BCC to the program.

• This was not a good experience for the citizen
• Some citizen emails bounced because the message size was too large

You can now set up as many individual email templates as you like, such as:

• One for the program area
• One for the citizen
• One for a service provider

Like your single template before, you can:

• Specify the Sender and recipient(s)
• Customize the Subject line
• Write Body text
• Use form data to personalize the subject or body

The new templates also allow you to:

• Give each a descriptive name for reference
• Set the order in which it’s processed (or just organize it the list)
• Set a condition for when to use that template
• Control which attachments to include
• Support multiple languages

This new feature will:

• Send all the emails you’ve created,
• That match the criteria you specified,
• In the appropriate language (if you’ve set that up)

Note that if any of your forms had customized email settings, those have been imported into the “default” email template.

See the Orbeon manual:

• Email settings

Previously, if you wanted to change the message displayed when a citizen submits a form, you had to request we configure this on the server for you, and we were restricted to plain text.

• You can now change these yourself using the new Messages feature
• You can include things like rich text formatting and links

For example, if something goes wrong with the processing, citizens get a generic “contact the administrator” message. You could change this and ask that they contact the program area.

See the Orbeon blog post:

• Customizing Form Runner messages

Sometimes you want a form to be available only between specific dates and times, like a nomination or grant application period.

You can now set a time window for your form.

• Set the start and end dates and times for your window
• Optionally provide messages to people who are early or late

See the Orbeon manual:

• Time window

We’ve added file scanning to the attachment controls that prevent people from uploading any of the file types Outlook doesn’t allow.

If a citizen uploaded one of these types and the form was submitted using email, the mail servers would just discard the message without notifying you or them.

Microsoft support article:

• Blocked attachments in Outlook

There are also new tools and features that give us more capability to improve your or the citizen’s experience. These new capabilities will allow us to do things like:

• Implement the just-released Design System
• Create an analytics dashboard and reporting system
• Support form deployment outside the main government website
• Give autogenerated PDFs a more formal look, including the correct wordmark
• Develop a “one-click” method of transferring forms from one ministry to another when there are reorganizations

Keep an eye out for invitations to previews or design sessions in the future.