Orbeon help for new users

Dear Friends,
                     We are part of a software team serving the needs of a reputed education and research institute. Our work entails generation of numerous web-forms on regular basis. We're in search of a robust form-builder tool which can scale well for an organization of our size. We have zeroed in on Orbeon as one of the possible tools for our requirement. We have tried Orbeon (Community Edition) and have found it to be extremely efficient. We need your kind assistance for the following:

1) Is it possible to store the forms published by form runner, on our internal server ?? We could not find out where the forms go once they are generated. Can we tweak the software in such a way that the generated forms remain in our possession ??

2) Can the form controls be initialized (or populated) with the help of the data residing on our internal database servers ??

We are still in the process of referring Orbeon documentation, so please bear with us if some of our queries sound rather trivial.

Thanks,
Seema Shukla.

I am out of the office until 26th July

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The Stationery Office Limited is registered in England No. 3049649 at 10 Eastbourne Terrace, London, W2 6LG

 

1. Yes. Orbeon supports variety of databases like Mysql, oracle etc. So the form designed using your server   gets stored in the corresponding database as xml content.

2. You can very well do that ! Orbeon PE has feature called Database services and actions using which you can populate the form with the data stored in the database or even with the data from the url.

I am out of the office until 26th July

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Please note that incoming and outgoing email communications passing through our IT systems may be monitored and/or intercepted by us solely to determine whether the content is business related and compliant with company standards.

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The Stationery Office Limited is registered in England No. 3049649 at 10 Eastbourne Terrace, London, W2 6LG

 

We are facing few troubles while using Orbeon with mysql. Kindly help us in resolving these issues.

We have followed the following steps to configure Orbeon with mysql:

1) Copied mysql-connector-java-5.1.13-bin.jar to tomcat/lib.

2) Created table orbeon_form_definition, orbeon_form_data etc. (as given in user-guide) in mysql, which runs on an external machine with ip 10.99.99.140. We are using "orbeon" as username and password. The name of schema is also "orbeon".

3) Copied the following to conf/server.xml
   <Resource name="jdbc/mysql" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
    initialSize="3" maxActive="10" maxIdle="20" maxWait="30000"
    driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
    poolPreparedStatements="true"
    username="orbeon"
    password="orbeon"
    url="jdbc:mysql://10.99.99.140/orbeon"/> 

4) Added the following property to properties-local.xml (located inside WEB-INF/resource/config) within <properties> tag
        <property as="xs:anyURI"  name="oxf.fr.persistence.app.uri.*.*.*" value="/fr/service/mysql"/> 
       
       
When we try to save the example form (Bookshelf), the form data and definitions are not getting saved in the database. We cannot see any listing in the summary page either (http://localhost:8080/orbeon/fr/orbeon/bookshelf/summary).

Kindly answer the following questions:

a) Why are the form definitions and data not being saved.

b) Is the url in step 3 written appropriately ??

c) In step 4, do we need to make any changes to properties-local.xml located inside WEB-INF/lib/orbeon-resources-private.jar/config ??

       

I am out of the office until 26th July

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Whilst we have taken reasonable precautions to ensure that this email has been swept for computer viruses, we cannot guarantee that this email does not contain such material and we therefore advise you to carry out your own virus checks. We do not accept liability for any damage or losses sustained as a result of such material.

 

Please note that incoming and outgoing email communications passing through our IT systems may be monitored and/or intercepted by us solely to determine whether the content is business related and compliant with company standards.

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The Stationery Office Limited is registered in England No. 3049649 at 10 Eastbourne Terrace, London, W2 6LG

 

1. Run the following data definition statements to create the tables:

        create table orbeon_form_definition (
            created timestamp,
            last_modified datetime,
            username varchar(256),
            app varchar(256),
            form varchar(256),
            deleted char(1),
            xml mediumtext
        );
        create table orbeon_form_definition_attach (
            created timestamp,
            last_modified timestamp,
            username varchar(256),
            app varchar(256),
            form varchar(256),
            deleted char(1),
            file_name varchar(256),
            file_content longblob
        );
        create table orbeon_form_data (
            created timestamp,
            last_modified timestamp,
            username varchar(256),
            app varchar(256),
            form varchar(256),
            document_id varchar(256),
            deleted char(1),
            xml mediumtext
        );
        create table orbeon_form_data_attach (
            created timestamp,
            last_modified timestamp,
            username varchar(256),
            app varchar(256),
            form varchar(256),
            document_id varchar(256),
            deleted char(1),
            file_name varchar(256),
            file_content longblob
        );


2. Download  mysql-connector-java-5.1.12-bin.jar and place it in apache-tomcat\lib folder

3. In the conf.xml insert the database details

e.g

<Resource name="jdbc/mysql" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
    initialSize="3" maxActive="10" maxIdle="20" maxWait="30000"
    driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
    poolPreparedStatements="true"
    username="orbeon"
    password="orbeon"
    url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/orbeon"/>

4. Navigate to properties-local.xml file in \orbeon\WEB-INF\resources\config. Initially you have to rename properties-local.xml.template file to properties-local.xml and insert the following line

<property as="xs:anyURI" name="oxf.fr.persistence.service.mysql.datasource" value="mysql"/>

the value attribute is same as resource name mentioned in the previous step(excluding jdbc/)

5. Add the following line to the same file to denote that all forms you create through orbeon uses mysql database

<property as="xs:anyURI"  name="oxf.fr.persistence.app.uri.*.*.*" value="/fr/service/mysql"/>

Thts it ! After you make these changes you should construct a form, save it , publish it. Then you shld check the table you created. The form will be stored as xml in the database!


******** Make sure you followed all the steps. I think you missed the 4th step !

I am out of the office until 26th July

***********************************************************************************************

This email, including any attachment, is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient or if you have received this email in error, please inform the sender immediately by reply and delete all copies from your system. Do not retain, copy, disclose, distribute or otherwise use any of its contents.

 

Whilst we have taken reasonable precautions to ensure that this email has been swept for computer viruses, we cannot guarantee that this email does not contain such material and we therefore advise you to carry out your own virus checks. We do not accept liability for any damage or losses sustained as a result of such material.

 

Please note that incoming and outgoing email communications passing through our IT systems may be monitored and/or intercepted by us solely to determine whether the content is business related and compliant with company standards.

***********************************************************************************************

The Stationery Office Limited is registered in England No. 3049649 at 10 Eastbourne Terrace, London, W2 6LG

 

Thanks for earlier responses. Your inputs have been extremely helpful.

We have been using Orbeon CE for last few weeks and have found its performance satisfactory to our needs. Form creation, deployment and connection to database worked fine but loading initial data into forms proved to be problematic. We were wondeing if you could tell us some ways to load initial form data (specifically, populating drop down controls) from external databases, as it is central to our requirement. We have referenced the following in Orbeon documentation:

1) http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/developer-guide/configuration-properties/configuration-properties-form-runner#TOC-Initial-instance

2) http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/how-to/load-initial-form-data

3) http://www.orbeon.com/orbeon/doc/reference-page-flow#xml-submission

4) http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/user-guide/form-builder-user-guide#TOC-Advanced:-services-and-actions

We were quite confused as to which of the above is the most preferred way of loading the initial data into forms. Can you please elaborate in simple terms how do we go about it ?? Is method 4) available only in Orbeon Professional Edition (PE)??

Thanks and Regards
Seema Shukla

Seema,

You would be using the techniques described in 1 and 2 to load an
initial instance if you want to pre-fill your form fields with some
dynamic data. However, if for a form you create in Form Builder you'd
like to call a service to populate drop-downs, then you need to use
the "services and actions". And yes, that feature is a PE-only
feature. (You can of course download a PE build, and get an evaluation
license for free from the web site.)

Alex

On Monday, August 2, 2010, Seema Shukla <[hidden email]> wrote: --
Orbeon Forms - Web forms, open-source, for the Enterprise -
http://www.orbeon.com/
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/avernet


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Seema,

You would be using the techniques described in 1 and 2 to load an
initial instance if you want to pre-fill your form fields with some
dynamic data. However, if for a form you create in Form Builder you'd
like to call a service to populate drop-downs, then you need to use
the "services and actions". And yes, that feature is a PE-only
feature. (You can of course download a PE build, and get an evaluation
license for free from the web site.)

Alex

On Monday, August 2, 2010, Seema Shukla <[hidden email]> wrote: --
Orbeon Forms - Web forms, open-source, for the Enterprise -
http://www.orbeon.com/
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/avernet


--
You receive this message as a subscriber of the [hidden email] mailing list.
To unsubscribe: mailto:[hidden email]
For general help: mailto:[hidden email]?subject=help
OW2 mailing lists service home page: http://www.ow2.org/wws

Thanks Alex... we got the PE trial working.